A newly-discovered asteroid masquerades as a bizarre comet, one that astronomers in a new study are outright calling, “weird and freakish.”
First spotted by the Hawaii-based Pan-STARRS sky survey telescope this Spring, the bizarre object caught astronomers’ attention because of its unusually fuzzy appearance. The Hubble Space Telescope’s high-resolution cameras were trained on it in September, and that’s when they noticed it’s startling, mutant comet appearance—the asteroid sports 6 tails streaming out into space in all directions.