Thanks to the Gaia spacecraft, astronomers have found hundreds of new potential double asteroids (also known as asteroid moons, mind you). As the European Space Agency ESA announced, the telescope could have discovered 352 new double asteroids in space.
“Double asteroids are difficult to find because they are usually small and far away from us,” ESA quotes the study’s author, Luana Liberato of the Côte d’Azur Observatory. It is believed that almost every sixth asteroid has a companion. However, out of about a billion asteroids, only 500 such double asteroids have been discovered so far.
‘Gaia’ mission on a great quest
ESA’s ‘Gaia’ mission aims to record the positions, motions, distances and brightness of almost two billion celestial objects. With the current data on more than 150,000 asteroids, researchers have been able to search for a wobble typical of double asteroids, caused by the gravitational pull of the asteroid companion.
According to Liberato, the new discovery shows: “There are many more asteroid moons waiting to be found.”
40 million observations per day
To measure the Milky Way, ‘Gaia’ has two telescopes with the largest digital space camera to date with almost a billion pixels. This means that each of the approximately one billion target stars will be monitored on average about 70 times over a period of five years and that their exact position and path through space will be measured. This corresponds to about forty million observations per day.
Source: Krone
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