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In October 2020,NASA ’s OSIRIS - king spacecraft approached the asteroid Bennu . The probe , which had been orbiting its target for almost two year , lowered a robotic limb and scooped up about 4.4 pound ( 2 kilograms ) of dusty , bouldery material from the asteroid ’s surface . This textile is the first sample distribution of an asteroid accumulate by a U.S. mission , and it might help scientists do some dumbfound question : How old areasteroidslike Bennu ? And how long do they last ?
To see how long asteroids last , it ’s crucial to know when and how they formed . The asteroid in oursolar systemcoalesced out of the protoplanetary disk , a thick collection of dust and rocky cloth that swirled around our Lord’s Day 4.5 billion years ago .
How old are asteroids and how long do they last?
" The rubble start to coagulate , " saidHarold Connolly , an astronomer at Rowan University in New Jersey and a mission sample scientist for OSIRIS - REx . Over time , these rubble bunnies collected more and more cloth , collided with one another and stick together . Some of them snowball into whole planet , like Earth . Others became Moon , comets and asteroid .
Most of the asteroid in thesolar systemnow reside in the asteroid belt , which stretch between Mars and Jupiter , though occasionally some get ejected from the belt and become approximate - Earth asteroid . The largest integral asteroid are roughly the same age as the solar system : 4.5 billion years old . But some asteroids can be think younger , since they consist of modest piece that break off from these larger bodies .
How do asteroids die?
asteroid can break up and eventually get destroyed in a few different shipway . One is by spinning . asteroid are ordinarily irregularly work — unlike planets , which have enough gravity to pull themselves into a rough sphere — and so they be given to list to one side . If they set about to spin after a hit or from being pushed by solar radiation , the force can broadcast chunk of asteroid fell off into space . " You get a little difference in torque here and there , and finally it falls apart , " Connolly say .
Related : What bump when the dinosaur - killing asteroid flap down into Earth ?
Asteroids can also break up from thermal stress , which is cause when their materials expand and contract in the sun ’s heat for millions of years , or when they experience sudden water red ink as methamphetamine hydrochloride inside the asteroid is change into gas by our genius ’s warmth .
How old are asteroids and how long do they last?
Sometimes , asteroids break up from collisions with other stony celestial objects , " kind of like a cosmic billiards biz , " Connolly told Live Science . Based on the probability of dissolution , " a 1 kilometer [ 0.6 mile ] thing can last about 440 million years , [ and ] a 10 kilometre [ 6.2 miles ] object around 4 billion eld " in the asteroid belt , Kevin Walsh , an uranologist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado , told Live Science in an email .
scientist are still influence to find out how long the largest asteroid can last , but it ’s possible that some may prevail as long as the rocky privileged planets of the solar system do — between 8 billion and 10 billion years . ( In more or less 5 billion years , when the Sunday is around 10 billion years sometime , our ace is expected to burn outand swallow up its neighbors , including satellite and asteroid . )
Once an asteroid fragment into small enough pieces , its flyspeck bits no longer count as an asteroid — a glob of blank space debris smaller than 3.2 foot ( 1 meter ) is technically reclassify as a meteoroid , accord toNASA . At this point , those meteor fragments may collide with a larger body , leaving an impact crater . Or they may hybridize paths with a planet that has an atmosphere , such as Earth , and become meteors streaking across the sky .
The pieces may also issue forth back together and take form what ’s known as a debris pile asteroid . These composite eubstance get " a 2d aliveness , in a smaller disconnected version of the initial asteroid,“Fred Jourdan , a geochronologist at Curtin University in Australia , told Live Science .
— What ’s the maximum number of planet that could orbit the sun ?
— Why are asteroids and comet such eldritch shapes ?
— What ’s the smallest known asteroid ? What about the largest ?
The various bits and while are held together with nothing more than their own gravity acting as glue . " It is literally a big pile of rocks with a portion of empty space , " Walsh said .
That may seem like a tenuous connection , but these asteroids are tougher than they sound : The quad between their pieces acts like shock absorbers against collisions . " Their special bodily structure makes them almost perdurable , " Jourdan say , unless they crash into a satellite or fall into the sun . Most near - Earth asteroid , including Bennu , are rubble pile asteroids .
When the sample from Bennu reach Earth this free fall , their structure will give stargazer an even good musical theme of when the rubble mess ’s part broke off from their parent eubstance and how they came back together . " It ’s buy the farm to be a lot of fun , " Connolly said .
