Unique, Dog Bone Asteroid Sighting and 2 Moons

Suara.com – Scientists managed to take the best image to date, from asteroid which is shaped like a dog’s bone and two small moons.

These observations give experts insight into how the strange trio’s object came to be.

An astronomer first spotted the Cleopatra space rock among other space rocks in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in 1880.

But in recent decades, experts have noticed that the space rock has a strange shape with two tiny moons.

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To study it, the team used the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

“Cleopatra is truly a unique object in our solar system. Understanding this complex multiple asteroid system can help us learn more about our solar system,” said Franck Marchis, astronomer at the SETI Institute, California, as quoted from Space.com, Friday (10/9/2021).

In 2008, Marchis and a team of experts had seen two Cleopatra moons, named AlexHelios and CleoSelene.

Scientists wanted to monitor the system and surveillance conducted from 2017 to 2019 has refined the expert picture of Cleopatra.

The new observation came from the instrument Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) pada Very Large Telescope.

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The research required observing dim exoplanets around bright stars.

So SPHERE is in the right position to see the small moons orbiting the main body of Cleopatra at a distance of 200 million km from Earth.

Not only that, this instrument is also equipped with a high-power adaptive optical system to adjust the image due to blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere. As a result, the team of experts got super sharp photos.

Because the resulting image is so sharp, scientists can use it to refine Cleopatra’s main chunk model.

At the same time to show exactly how the two moons AlexHelios and CleoSelene orbit the larger part.

With the new orbital data, scientists determined that Cleopatra was about 35 percent smaller than previously estimated.

The new measurements show that the asteroid is not as dense as experts believe, although the team considers the object to be metal-rich.

In addition, the new analysis also shows that AlexHelios and CleoSelene came from Cleopatra herself.

However, experts have not ruled out the possibility if there are other small moons orbiting Cleopatra.

But the team of scientists will have to wait for more powerful instruments to see such objects.

The researchers were able to make follow-up observations using ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, which is scheduled to launch later this decade.

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