Just when we think we are starting to have a handle on some of the things we see in space, the universe has to throw another curveball—a six-tailed spinning asteroid type curveball to be exact. Last September, Astronomers saw for the first time an asteroid with six comet-like tails using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

“We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it,” said principle investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles.

“Even more amazing, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust. That also caught us by surprise. It’s hard to believe we’re looking at an asteroid,” said Jewitt. Jewitt was the team’s leader on the research paper, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Comets are the space satellites that have tails, which occur when they pass close to the sun. The heat starts to melt their surfaces, breaking loose dust and rock that trail then behind the comet, casting a bright blue tail.

Asteroids, however, are nothing more that tiny points of light rushing through the sky; that is except for P/2013 P5, which looks more like a rotating lawn sprinkler. The phenomenon has been ejecting dust every now and then the last five months, which leads scientists to believe its rotation increased to the point where its surface began breaking apart.

The first image shot of P/2013 P5 came from the Pan-STARRS survey telescope in Hawaii. Scientists had captured a blurry image of the object and announced the discovery on August 27.

Then the Hubble Telescope captured a more detailed image on September 10. At close observance with the shaper image, scientists realized the asteroid’s appearance was completely different. It appeared as though it had swung around.

To get to the bottom of this surprise, team member Jessica Agarwal of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Lindau, Germany carefully modeled the asteroid and came to the idea that a set of impulsive dust-ejection events could have caused the tails.

These dust-ejection events, by Agarwal’s calculations, happened on April 15, July 18, July 24, August 8, August 26 and September 4. The sun’s radiation pressure then stretched the dust flung from the asteroid into streamers.

The sun’s radiation could also be responsible for P/2013 P5’s increased rotation. The rotation, according to Jewitt, sped to a degree capable of weakening the asteroid’s gravity, causing it to lose the dust.

Jewitt also concludes that the P/2013 P5 asteroid is most likely a fragment of a much bigger asteroid that broke apart during a collision some 200 million years ago.