Why this asteroid discovered by Vera Rubin is giving scientists a headache

Scientists have discovered a set of ultra-fast-rotating asteroids in the solar system, with one of them spinning at dizzying speeds never seen before. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which houses the world’s largest digital camera, spotted 19 of them in the Asteroid Belt that sits between Mars and Jupiter. The findings were described in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Researchers say that the speed of rotation of an asteroid can indicate how it was formed, its composition and the changes it underwent throughout its life. If an asteroid is spinning at an extremely fast pace, it could mean that it encountered another rock and could even break apart soon. Of the 76 asteroids mentioned in he paper, 16 are super-fast rotators, rotating between 13 minutes and 2.2 hours, while three are ultra-fast ones, rotating once every five minutes or less.

All 19 asteroids are a minimum of 300 feet long, with some over 3,000 feet in diameter. The one that is the most intriguing is 2025 MN45, as it has been given the title of the fastest-spinning asteroid among rocks measuring 500 metres or more. This asteroid is a whopping 2,300 feet in diameter and rotates once every 1.88 minutes. This speed should have led it to break apart, but that hasn't happened. “Clearly, this asteroid must be made of material that has very high strength in order to keep it in one piece as it spins so rapidly,” lead author Sarah Greenstreet said in a NOIRLab statement.

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Asteroids spinning at ultra-fast speeds

Greenstreet is also the lead of Rubin Observatory’s Solar System Science Collaboration’s Near-Earth Objects and Interstellar Objects working group. She added that asteroid 2025 MN45 should have a strength of a solid piece of rock to have remained intact till now. "This is somewhat surprising since most asteroids are believed to be what we call ‘rubble pile’ asteroids, which means they are made of many, many small pieces of rock and debris that coalesced under gravity during Solar System formation or subsequent collisions," she said.

She also heaped praises on the Rubin observatory, saying, "Rubin is successfully allowing us to study a population of relatively small, very-rapidly-rotating main-belt asteroids that hadn’t been reachable before." Rubin’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time will begin this year and will help discover more such rotators and reveal their collisional histories and strengths.