NASA-International Space Station

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that propose a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought that the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

The object, “P/2010 A2”, was circling about 144 million kilometres from Earth in the major asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter when it was covered last week by the Hubble Space Telescope. “The truth is we’re still struggling to understand what this means,” said David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. – (Reuters).