About Vera Rubin Just Found the Fastest Spinning Asteroid We've Ever Seen
A mountain of rock is spinning in the dark between Mars and Jupiter. It turns a full circle every 113 seconds. Lay the Empire State Building on its side. This rock is wider. For decades, scientists believed a rock this big would shatter at that speed. Most asteroids are loose piles of gravel, held together by weak gravity. Spin them too fast, and they fly apart. But this rock holds together. A brand new telescope in Chile spotted it in just 10 hours of test images. Scientists confirmed the record in a study published in January 2026. Now they want to know what it is made of, and where it came from. And what it means for every rock that might 1 day head toward Earth. Today, we visit an asteroid breaking apart in slow motion. We watch a space rock explode over a European city. We follow a spacecraft that crashed into an asteroid on purpose. Sources
Vera Rubin Just Found the Fastest Spinning Asteroid We've Ever Seen is presented by Late Science. Its listed runtime is 125 minutes. The source link and publisher attribution are provided with the embedded film.
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- 125 minutes
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