Asteroid ‘Vesta’ Has Itself A Lumpy Ass. Space Shame.

(Click to enlarge. Via: Vesta’s odd bottom)

Vesta is an asteroid  300 miles wide. According to Phil Plait, that means the son of a gun should be crushed into sphere. Yet, it isn’t.

Why is that?

Bad Astronomy:

My first assumption is that something really big hit Vesta a long time ago, carving out that basin. Central peaks are common in events like that, smack dab in the middle of the crater (like the gorgeous mountain in the Moon’s Tycho crater), and we see one here, too – that dark spot in the middle, more obvious in an earlier image from Dawn. It’s huge, many kilometers across, but like the asteroid itself it’s weird: it’s really round and smooth, not jagged and sharp like most central peaks. I was at first surprised to find out some scientists are wondering if the basin was from an impact (the usual suspect) or if it were due to some internal process… but then, looking again at the basin and mound, they’re strange enough that maybe sometimes you need to think a little differently.

The universe, constantly causing us to reevaluate our common ideas. Love it.