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We already knew that Asteroid 130 Elektra was special. Astronomers have discovered that it has two moons before, making it a rare triple asteroid system. Now a third moon may have been found, making it even rarer – the first known quadruple asteroid in the solar system.
Electra was first discovered in 1873 while orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is a relatively large asteroid, rectangular in shape and 160 miles wide at its longest side, and orbits the sun every five years.
The first moon to orbit Elektra was discovered in 2003, and a second in 2014. Discoveries were interesting, but not unusual – more 150 asteroids They are known to have one or two moons, just as planets may have moons that are gravitationally bound to them. “Multiple moons can be found around large asteroids,” said Bin Yang, an astronomer with the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Discovered Elektra’s second moon. A NASA mission DART aims to collide with moon of such asteroid at the end of the year.
But so far, an asteroid with three moons has eluded astronomers. Anthony Berdeu of Thailand’s National Research Institute of Astronomy and colleagues used images from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to take a closer look at Electra and found evidence for a previously hidden moon in the orbits of the other two.
Dr. “This is the first asteroid to have three moons,” Berdeu said. “We’re pretty confident. It’s pretty exciting.”
their results Published Tuesday In the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
At a small diameter of one mile, the moon would be slightly smaller than its 1.2- and 3.7-mile diameter siblings. It swings around Elektra every 16 hours, only 220 miles away. To an observer standing on the third moon’s surface, Elektra would appear large in the sky.
Dr. Berdeu says he was able to find the moon by using a new algorithm to suppress the Moon’s extremely weak light in images taken by the VLT.
Not included in this article, Dr. Yang said he and other astronomers “have been trying to search for quadruple systems for some time,” and his team has seen encouraging hints of this third month in their 130 Electra study. . He said this discovery would be “a very exciting result,” but more observations will be required to confirm the moon’s existence.
Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast and not involved in the paper, says the moons are most likely fragments of Elektra that were broken in a collision when another object slammed into it. crashed into asteroid in the past. “They all seem to be made of the same material,” he said.
Further study of this system could reveal the stability of such multimoon asteroids. Dr. “It’s very strange,” said Berdeu, that the orbit of this third moon is misaligned with respect to the other two. Dr. Yang said he thinks the system is unstable and “may crash into Elektra at the end of the interior months.”
It can also tell us more about the formation of multi-moon asteroids. Dr. “This new finding will inspire modelers to look at asteroid impact formation and try to put a limit on how many moons an impact can create,” Yang said. “How many months can a system really last?”
Further studies are also expected to reveal more quad systems. New telescopes like the Extremely Large Telescope currently being built in Chileit will have the observing power to more easily detect these multi-moon asteroid systems.
And astronomers may not stop at quadruple asteroids. Dr. “There is no limit to what we can find,” said Berdeu. “We hope to find more quad systems and why not quintuple or six.”
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