In late June the rock made its closest pass of Earth for the next 170 years, so scientists decided to spend a little more time studying it before it heads back out again. When they zoomed in on what they thought was a regular ol’ asteroid what they began to see double. 2017 YE5, it turns out, isn’t one asteroid. It’s two.
Rather than one chunk of space rock, YE5 is two separate objects that revolve around each other while the two careen through the Solar System. The rocks are virtually identical in size and appear to have very similar shapes as well.
Twin asteroids are incredibly rare, at least here in our Solar System, and they’re a huge treat for scientists whenever they’re spotted. Sometimes larger asteroids are orbited by much smaller rocks, but “equal mass” asteroid pairs are particularly special. In fact, 2017 YE5 is only the fourth such binary asteroid pair ever observed.- READ MORE
[divider][/divider]The bizarre interstellar visitor that whizzed through our Solar System late last year stunned scientists the world over. The object, named Oumuamua snuck up out of nowhere, cruising around the Sun and then slingshotting back out into space before most astronomers even knew what to make of it. Its strange shape and odd coloring were so strange that some researchers thought it might have been an alien probe checking us out.
Once that was put to rest, one of the more humorous twists to the story was the repeated flip-flopping of scientists who couldn’t decide whether it was a comet or an asteroid. It was initially thought to be a comet, but its lack of an iconic tail suggested otherwise. So, it was an asteroid, at least for a little while, but subsequent rounds of research suggested it was a comet again… then an asteroid, again. Now, yet another study has been published in Nature and, well, it’s definitely a comet. Again.
The new paper, which was led by an astronomer with the European Space Agency (ESA), takes a close look at the strange visitor as it speeds away from our Solar System. The data reveals that the object is speeding up as it exits our neighborhood, which shouldn’t be possible if it were just a rocky asteroid being flung by gravity.
Instead, the researchers say, the object being a comet would explain its acceleration. The idea being that gasses heated during Oumuamua’s close brush with our Sun are actually pushing it faster and faster, matching what we know about comets.
So, the cigar-shaped object is actually a comet after all… or so the scientists say. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [contentcards url=”https://bgr.com/2018/07/13/twin-asteroids-2017-ye5-double-space-rocks/” target=”_blank”]