Asteroid With Six Tails Leaves Astronomers Dumbfounded
Weird things are afoot in the asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. A newly identified asteroid called P/2013 P5 is posing as a comet, with not one but six dust tails trailing behind it.
Astronomers who spotted the strange, fuzzy-looking rock hurtling through space, first with the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii and later with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, are calling it a "weird and freakish object"—and that's only the language they're willing to put in their press release.