As the name suggests, the instrument was originally developed to spot alien planets, according to the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which operates the facility. Those new observations come from the Very Large Telescope’s Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument.
But even after the discovery, scientists wanted to keep an eye on the system - and observing the asteroid from 2017 to 2019 has finetuned researchers’ picture of Kleopatra. In 2008, Marchis and his colleagues had spotted Kleopatra’s two moons, AlexHelios and CleoSelene, named for two children of ancient Egypt’s most famous queen. “I think Kleopatra is one of those and understanding this complex, multiple asteroid system can help us learn more about our solar system.” “Science makes a lot of progress thanks to the study of weird outliers,” he added. “Kleopatra is truly a unique body in our solar system,” Franck Marchis, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California and at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France, who led new research on the asteroid, said in a statement.
0 kommentar(er)
