Asteroid Bennu may have gotten its spinning best form from landslides

Asteroids that are shaped like spinning tops, this sort of as Bennu and Ryugu, may well have been slowed down and formed by a series of massive landslides

By Leah Crane

Large landslides on the asteroid Bennu and other, equivalent room rocks may well have been considerably additional critical to their evolution than researchers beforehand realised. They could have supplied these asteroids their odd spinning-top shapes, as perfectly as slowed their rotation and served protect against them from slipping apart.

Bennu is most likely a rubble-pile asteroid, indicating that rather of just one large rock, it is manufactured of several chunks of rock held alongside one another by gravity. This signifies that it isn’t specially hard for even a fairly smaller effects by …