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The asteroid YE5 turned out to be actually a binary system sharing the same size but different reflectivity characteristics among them
The asteroid YE5 was discovered by an observatory in Morocco in December 2017. However, they did not know many details of this object until the end of June of this year when it crossed very close to Earth . NASA's astronomers took a pleasant surprise when they realized that what they thought was a single celestial body was actually two orbits each other .
On June 21, the asteroid reached the nearest point I would be on Earth in 170 years . It's 6 million kilometers, or 16 times the distance from our planet to the moon. That day, NASA noticed that the object had a strange shape, like lying down. Shortly after they could see that it was two bodies that were turning in a relatively short space between them.
A binary system
What makes this pair of asteroids special? After all, according to NASA, at least 15% of asteroids close to Earth with a diameter of more than 200 meters are binary . The difference is that these systems are not so similar to each other. Normally, a small body revolves around a larger one. However, this is not the case with YE5.
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