The Headless Comet

The Headless Comet |P / 2010 A2, a minor body of the Solar System with a diameter of about 150 m, was discovered on 6 January 2010 thanks to the LINEAR program (Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research).

Initially identified as a periodic comet (orbital period of less than 200 years), belonging to the main asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, it immediately aroused great interest because despite having a weak tail, the presence of an effective hair has not been detected.

Thanks to subsequent analysis using the Hubble Space Telescope, it has been possible to trace the reason for this particularity: most likely the tail, more than from the sublimation of cometary ice typical in similar objects, it was generated by the recent collision between two asteroids.

Another factor in favor of the aforementioned thesis is represented by the current position of the nucleus; it’s in fact unbalanced in comparison to the axis formed by the tail and the external area that should represent the crown. This situation is not present in any other cometary observation. The crown, according to many scholars, could be composed of particles with a diameter of a few millimeters, blown away by solar radiation.