Where did the pieces come from?: ESO displays the most accurate images of the asteroid to date

Thursday 14 October 2021

Where do the pieces come from?
ESO shows the most accurate images of the asteroid to date

Between the planetary orbits of Mars and Jupiter is the so-called asteroid belt. But where do all the asteroids come from? High-resolution images of celestial bodies should help answer this question. The sharp images also reveal two sets of shapes.

Astronomers have captured 42 asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter more sharply than ever before. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) based in Garching, said images of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), a large telescope in Chile made up of four individual telescopes, showed “a wide range of strange shapes, from spherical to dog bones”. Munich.

Astronomers published a study of the objects in the so-called asteroid belt In the journal “Astronomy and Astrophysics”. The recordings can help determine where the asteroids come from.

Objects are denser than diamond

So the celestial bodies can be divided into a group of spherical bodies and a group of elongated bodies of bony shape and differ greatly in density: some asteroids are almost as dense as coal, others are more dense than diamond. “We can only understand this huge diversity in their composition if the bodies formed in different regions of the solar system,” said one of the study’s authors, Joseph Hanus of Charles University in Prague. The results supported the assumption that the least dense asteroids formed outside Neptune.

Previously, only three large asteroids in the belt were drawn in such detail in the context of space missions, said study leader, Pierre Vernazza, of the Astrophysics Laboratories de Marseille in France. So little is known about its shape and density.

asteroids They are the smaller siblings of the planets, the smaller astronomical bodies are made up of rocks and metals. Because it is small and light, its orbit around the Sun does not necessarily remain constant, but can change due to the gravitational forces of other bodies.