(NLDO) - The moons recently captured by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia spacecraft are extremely difficult to see satellites of asteroids.
ESA's Gaia spacecraft is a powerful space observatory tasked with mapping our Milky Way galaxy. In addition to identifying and tracking billions of stars, it has just returned a staggering dataset of 353 previously unknown moons.
Image shows the orbits of some known asteroids forming intricate "spider web" rings surrounding the Sun - Photo: ESA
They are not moons of planets like Earth's Moon or Jupiter's Europa and Ganymede.
They are asteroid moons, small space rocks that orbit larger space rocks, forming parent-child asteroid pairs.
A famous example of this type of moon is Dimorphos, a satellite of Didymos and also a "victim" of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) in 2022.
According to Live Science, a new announcement by ESA said that 352 moons have just been discovered orbiting asteroids previously thought to be isolated within the Solar System.
The breakthrough shows that stellar surveyors have the ability to perform “blind searches” to identify tiny “baby” asteroids.
These are just preliminary observations. If the data is confirmed, the number of known binary asteroids in the Solar System will double.
If the new observations are confirmed, these 352 pairs would nearly double the number of known binary asteroid systems in the Solar System.
"Binary asteroids are difficult to find because they are usually very small and very far away from us," said Dr. Luana Liberato from the Côte d'Azur Observatory (France), head of the research team.
They believe that nearly one-sixth of asteroids are not alone, but so far, there are only more than 500 known pairs out of the 1 billion asteroids roaming the Solar System.
“But this discovery shows that there are many more asteroids out there waiting to be discovered,” said Dr Liberato.
Source: https://nld.com.vn/tau-vu-tru-chau-au-phat-hien-352-mat-trang-moi-196240814155408872.htm
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