For the first time, scientists say they have observed an asteroid break apart in the middle of its flight, as they watched the space rock crumble into at least 10 pieces.

According to Reuters, the asteroid, dubbed P/2013 R3, was among a plethora of spatial objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Although asteroids are well known to break apart mid flight, scientists had never witnessed it happen until now.

"After looking at the asteroid belt for a couple of hundred years - the first one was discovered in 1801 - to find a new thing like this is really exciting," lead researcher David Jewitt, a UCLA astronomer, told Reuters.

The findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team first noticed an unrecognizable object on Sept. 15, 2013 with the Catalina and Sky-STARRS sky surveys. After a follow-up with the ESA's Keck Telescope, the researchers knew they wanted to give the event another look with the Hubble Telescope.

"This is a rock. Seeing it fall apart before our eyes is pretty amazing," Jewitt said in a press release. "Keck showed us that this thing was worth looking at with Hubble."

The space-based Hubble showed the broken-up asteroid in incredible detail, showing 10 distinct fragments. The four largest pieces were each 200 meters in radius. The asteroid fragments are also moving at a rate equal to a human walking, about 1.5 kilometers per hour.

"This is a really bizarre thing to observe -- we've never seen anything like it before," study co-author Jessica Agarwal, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, said in the release. "The break-up could have many different causes, but the Hubble observations are detailed enough that we can actually pinpoint the process responsible."

The crumbling asteroid very unlikely resulted from a collision with another. If it had, the pieces would be traveling much faster and the initial crash would have caused instant and violent disintegration.

"This is the latest in a line of weird asteroid discoveries, including the active asteroid P/2013 P5, which we found to be spouting six tails," Agarwal said. "This indicates that the Sun may play a large role in disintegrating these small Solar System bodies, by putting pressure on them via sunlight."