Spinning space rock discovered by scientists breaks records

Scientists have discovered a huge asteroid the size of eight football fields hurtling through space.

It's been named 2025 MN45 and as it travels, it's spinning really, really fast.

In fact, its speedy spin is breaking records - it completes a full rotation in about 113 seconds, making it the fastest-spinning asteroid of its size ever discovered.

And its size is massive: it's about 2,300 feet (710 meters) wide.

The newly discovered asteroid is:

Asteroids are big chunks of rock which float though space and orbit the Sun.

They are much smaller than planets, and can vary in size.

The biggest, called Ceres, is around 940 km wide - that's twice as big as the Grand Canyon! Some of the smaller asteroids can be around six metres in size.

There are lots of asteroids in our solar system, and most of them are in the main asteroid belt, which floats between Mars and Jupiter.

This record-breaking asteroid was discovered by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy's Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

They found over 2000 asteroids, but this one stood out among the rest.

Its fast spin is exciting for the scientists that discovered it, as they say it gives them clues as to how it was made.

Sarah Greenstreet, an assistant astronomer at a lab at the National Science Foundation said in a statement: "Clearly, this asteroid must be made of material that has very high strength in order to keep it in one piece... It would need a cohesive strength similar to that of solid rock."

This would make it different to most other asteroids, which are usually formed with lots of smaller rocks, held together by gravity.

Asteroids spin mainly because they are hit by other things in space.

Scientists who studied 2025 MN45 think that this asteroid could possible be a fragment of a much larger one, that shattered when it collided with something else.