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Gaia solves the mystery of tumbling asteroids and reveals what’s inside them

By combining Gaia’s massive asteroid dataset with AI modeling, scientists discovered that asteroid rotation depends on how often they’ve been hit. A mysterious gap in rotation speeds marks where collisions and internal friction balance out. This insight reveals that most asteroids are loose rubble piles, not solid rocks, and could behave very differently if struck by a deflection mission like NASA’s DART.

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