NASA's telescope Hubble Space captures best view ever of a comet breaking apart

NASA’s telescope Hubble Space has captured the sharpest images of a comet breaking apart. The comet is breaking apart 67 million miles away from Earth.

The comet is much smaller than astronomers thought, measuring only 1,600 feet across, about the length of five football fields.

Hubble showed 25 fragments consisting of a mixture of ice and dust that are drifting away from the comet at a pace equivalent to the walking speed of an adult.

The images suggest that the roughly 4.5-billion-year-old comet, named 332P/Ikeya-Murakami, or comet 332P, may be spinning so fast that material is ejected from its surface. The resulting debris is now scattered along a 3,000-mile-long trail, larger than the width of the continental United States.

These observations provide insight into the volatile behavior of comets as they approach the sun and begin to vaporize, unleashing powerful forces.

The Hubble images show that the parent comet changes brightness frequently, completing a rotation every two to four hours. A visitor to the comet would see the sun rise and set in as little as an hour.