ejecta

It was long thought that high-speed collisions pulverized the comet ejecta, but now a 45-member team of researchers reports, in a paper published online in the journal Icarus this week, that heat is to blame.

"To create these ions that we observed in the ejecta, it was clear that there had to be a source of high-energy radiation in the center of the SN 1987A remnant," Fransson said.

The supernova’s ejecta expands in an “hourglass shape” as it impacts this disk.

“It could have gone really badly. They could have had the vehicle destroyed on the launchpad from ejecta hitting it.”

What they got was even clearer: Within seconds of the impact, they watched in exquisite detail as the asteroid sneezed out a plume of ejecta.