Ateam of astronomers have obtained the sharpest and most detailed images yet of the asteroid Kleopatra, using the ecu Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT). The observations have allowed the team to constrain the 3D shape and mass of this peculiar asteroid, which resembles a dog bone, to a better accuracy than ever before. Their research also provides clues on how this asteroid and therefore the two moons that orbit it formed.
“Kleopatra is actually a singular body in our system ,” said lead researcher Franck Marchis, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, US, as per the study was published within the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics “Science makes tons of progress because of the study of weird outliers. i feel Kleopatra is one among those and understanding this complex, multiple asteroid system can help us learn more about our system ,” Marchis added.
Kleopatra orbits the Sun within the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers have called it a “dog-bone asteroid” ever since radar observations around 20 years ago revealed it’s two lobes connected by a thick “neck” In 2008, Kleopatra was found orbited by two moons, named AlexHelios and CleoSelene, after the Egyptian queen’s children.
To find out more, the team used snapshots of the asteroid taken at different times between 2017 and 2019 with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s VLT As the asteroid was rotating, they were ready to view it from different angles and to make the foremost accurate 3D models of its shape so far .
They constrained the asteroid’s dog-bone shape and its volume, finding one among the lobes to be larger than the opposite , and determined the length of the asteroid to be about 270 kilometres or about half the length of English Channel.
Kleopatra’s rubble-pile structure and therefore the way it rotates also give indications on how its two moons could have formed. The asteroid rotates almost at a critical speed, the speed above which it might start to disintegrate , and even small impacts may lift pebbles off its surface, the astronomers explained.