Scientists have found two large red objects in the asteroid belt that they believe shouldn’t be there — both have “complex organic matter” on their surfaces.
The two asteroids, named 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, were discovered by Jaxa, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Pompeiia is about 110 kilometers wide, while the smaller Justitia is only 55 kilometers in diameter.
These two objects, located in the rock group between Mars and Jupiter, are distinctly different from their neighbors. Both Pompeiia and Justitia reflect more red light than any other asteroid in the vicinity due to the presence of increasingly complex organic matter such as carbon or methane on their surfaces.
Such asteroids are not usually found within the belt, which is generally composed of bluer debris, but they are common in trans-Neptune and centaur objects (small bodies orbiting between Jupiter and Neptune) – which astronomers believe formed.
Jaxa believe that the movement of this asteroid stems from the anarchy of the early solar system, where the movement of massive plants like Jupiter made the gravitational field even more chaotic and sent these two bodies into the belt.
These events must have occurred in the early stages of our cosmic environment, because both have stable orbits.
“To get this organic substance, you first have to have a lot of ice on the surface,” said Michael Marsset, who works at recently released paper about this asteroid, told New York Time. “So they must have formed in a very cold environment. Then solar radiation from the ice creates this complex organic substance.”
The existence of this asteroid proved important to the Nice Model, which holds that Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune moved out of the solar system for a hundred million years, while Jupiter moved slightly inward.
The asteroid belt is estimated It contains between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids that are more than a kilometer in diameter and millions of asteroids that are even smaller. However, it is widely believed that those over 100 kilometers in diameter evaded the destructive physics of the early solar system and, in so doing, could provide important insights into this epoch.
Not all scientists subscribe to this idea; Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and head of NASA’s (Lucy) mission to study Jupiter’s asteroids, said: NOW that the asteroid should not be too red as it approaches the sun. Therefore, it is not entirely clear why the asteroids are so red, but unraveling this mystery may be related to understanding how they became part of the Belt.
To solve this mystery, it may be necessary to send a spacecraft to them for further investigation – something Jaxa said “should be considered a target country” in the future.
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