... that the ancient space rock was a rubble pile asteroid. Rubble piles form when an asteroid or moon is smashed to pieces by an impact, and the shattered pieces subsequently fall back together, primarily due to self-gravitation. Many...
... discoveries. In 2014, it detected evidence of asteroid collisions in a newly formed planetary system, providing evidence that such smash-ups might be common in early solar systems and crucial to the formation of some planets. In 2016, Spitzer worked...