By Tom Metcalfe - NBC News
The most detailed telescope photographs so far of the asteroid Kleopatra -
named after the ancient Egyptian queen
- clearly show its strange dog bone shape.
Astronomers believe their study could provide illuminating clues about the solar system.
The latest observations of the asteroid,
located more than 125 million miles from Earth
in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, have allowed scientists to more accurately measure the unusual shape and mass of Kleopatra, which has turned out to be a third lighter than expected, which gives clues about its composition and formation.
"Asteroids are not inert bodies, but complex mini-geological worlds," says Franck Marchis, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute in California and lead author of a new study on Cleopatra published this month in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
"
Kleopatra
and other strange asteroids are natural laboratories to challenge our knowledge of the solar system
and make us think outside the norm," he added.
The peculiar shape of the asteroid was confirmed 10 years ago.
Capture via NBC News
Kleopatra was discovered in 1880 and takes its name from the original spelling of Cleopatra in the Greek alphabet.
It is relatively large for an asteroid and was observed by ground-based telescopes for decades to determine its orbit around the sun.
Its peculiar shape was confirmed 10 years ago.
The latest photographs of the powerful Very Large Telescope from the European Southern Observatory, located in northern Chile, offer more details of its strange shape, with
two large lobes connected by a thick neck, so that it clearly resembles a bone.
Kleopatra measures roughly 160 miles from end to end -
the size of New Jersey
- and weighs more than 3.3 trillion tons.
It rotates approximately every five hours, and astronomers predict that if it rotated much faster its lobes could separate.
An asteroid will pass close to Earth on November 2
Aug. 26, 202000: 24
Marchis said that Kleopatra's unusual shape is a clue to its composition.
"It is probably a loosely bonded asteroid
, made of iron material debris,
" he said in an email.
Researchers believe it may have formed from the debris of a collision between larger asteroids that occurred billions of years ago.
A team led by Marchis announced in 2008 that their observations showed that Kleopatra also has two small moons, each a few kilometers across,
which they named AlexHelios and CleoSelene
after two of the Egyptian queen's children.
[A spacecraft that collected samples from the asteroid Bennu returns to Earth]
It is not uncommon for asteroids to have moons or to form binary systems in which two asteroids orbit each other.
At least 15 main belt asteroids are known to have moons and more than 400 pairs of asteroids have been found in orbit, Marchis said.
He also said that the latest observations have allowed astronomers to make detailed measurements of the orbits of the moons around Kleopatra, suggesting that they
are ancient conglomerates of debris detached from the main asteroid
.
Kleopatra, in other words, may have "given birth" to her children.