NASA’s James Webb supertelescope has discovered an unusual asteroid right in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
According to Scientific alertthe new discovery is one The asteroid is only 100 to 200 m in diameterhas never been known and is one of the smallest objects that space telescopes have “captured” in asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Astronomer Thomas Müller from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics – Germany said that this is a completely unexpected discovery, showing the possibility that many new objects previously invisible to humanity could be discovered by James Webb.
Graphic image depicting a “wanderer” in the middle of the asteroid belt
Graphic image depicting a “wanderer” in the middle of the asteroid belt – (Photo: N. Bartmann/ESA/Webb, ESO/M. Kornmesser and S. Brunier, N. Risinger)
Initially, this group of scientists used James Webb’s data to search for a much larger asteroid in the main belt – a belt of countless space rocks of different sizes wandering between orbits. Mars and Jupiter – are (10929) 198 BC1discovered in 1998 and has a diameter of 15.7 km.
The observation aimed to study this asteroid more closely, but failed because James Webb did not point in the right direction towards it and blew up the image of the target.
However, the research team collected another “treasure”, the small new asteroid mentioned above. Detecting something this small was impossible before. Objects of the same size that passed close to Earth at a much closer time were sometimes detected just days before their approach.
So this shows that James Webb has great potential in the search for new asteroids, as well as in Earth defense missions.
Researchers are still working to learn more before confirming and officially naming this newly discovered small asteroid, but the first results have been published on the Internet. Astronomy and astrophysics.
James Webb is the most powerful space telescope in the world today, just beginning its mission in 2022. It is built and operated by NASA, in collaboration with ESA and CSA (European Space Agency (Europe and Canada) .
Article source: NLD
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NASA’s James Webb supertelescope has discovered an unusual asteroid right in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
