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Astronomers have recovered interesting new views of a dog-bone-shaped asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.
Cleopatra, better known as the “dog bone asteroid” for its two-lobed shape, is around 270 kilometers long and has its own pair of moons. The new observations suggest that the asteroid is a loosely accumulated rubble pile that likely formed from giant impact debris.
“Kleopatra is truly a unique body in our solar system”, Franck Marchis, astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and at the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory in France, who led the new research on the asteroid , said in a press release. “Science is making a lot of progress through the study of weird outliers. I think Kleopatra is one of them, and understanding this complex, multi-asteroid system can help us learn more about our solar system. “
Related: 10 interesting places in the solar system we’d love to visit
Scientists first discovered Cleopatra’s dog bone shape about two decades ago. The moons were discovered in 2008 by Marchis and his colleagues, who nicknamed them Alexhelios and Cleoselene after the actual children of the Egyptian queen. Cleopatra. (Kleopatra is the Greek spelling of Cleopatra, who ruled Egypt between 51 BC and 30 BC)
New observations of the asteroid were made between 2017 and 2019 by the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile. As the asteroid spun, the telescope captured it from different angles, allowing new calculations of the length and volume of the asteroid.
The results, published Thursday, September 9 in two papers in the review Astronomy & Astrophysics, also reveal the orbits of the two moons of the asteroid. In addition to the length of the asteroid, this information allowed a team led by Miroslav Brož, astronomer from Charles University in Prague, to calculate the mass of the asteroid, which, at 3.27 quadrillion tons ( 2.97 quadrillion metric tons), turned out to be 35% lower than previously estimated. Its density, now estimated at 3.4 grams per cubic centimeter, is also lower than the previous estimate of 4.5 grams per cubic centimeter.
The asteroid is spinning very quickly, the researchers found, almost fast enough for it to begin to disintegrate. At this rotational speed, very small impacts can easily chip off pieces of the asteroid, which could be how Alexhelios and Cleoselene formed. Tiny impacts with other space debris may have lifted small pebbles and rocks from Cleopatra’s surface, and these small stones may have congregated in the asteroid’s two moons.
Astronomers hope to have more details on the dog bone asteroid in the coming years. In 2027, the European Southern Observatory will commission a new observatory called the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).
“I can’t wait to point the ELT at Cleopatra, see if there are more moons, and refine their orbits to detect small changes,” Marchis said.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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