Rubble pile asteroid is almost as old as the solar system, a sign that it can withstand great shocks and may be difficult to destroy, research suggests
, has found that Itokawa formed more than 4.2bn years ago, making it 10 times older than solid asteroids of a similar size. The solar system, in comparison, is 4.57bn years old.
Solid asteroids are thought to have a lifespan of several hundred million years, and are gradually ground down by constant collisions. “We were really surprised,” said Prof Fred Jourdan of Curtin University’s school of earth and planetary sciences, the study’s first author. “That’s really, really old, and I’m sure some of my colleagues are not even going to believe it.”Rubble-pile asteroids are so resilient to the constant battering they face that they are likely to be much more abundant than previously assumed. That might mean we need new ways to tackle such asteroids on a collision course with Earth, Jourdan said.
It is a far-reaching conclusion to draw from such tiny specks of dust, but each particle is analysed at the atomic level.
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