Thai and French astronomers have come across the first constellation of a total of four space rocks.
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Most asteroids race alone in the universe, but there are also those that fly close to each other’s gravitational field in pairs. They also rarely form triple systems in which two moons orbit a larger primary celestial body; no more complex constellations have been found so far.
The asteroid Elektra, located in the outer region of one of the main asteroid belts orbiting the Sun, was discovered in 1873. The first 6-kilometer-wide moon of the 200-kilometer-diameter, gigantic space rock was discovered in 2003, realizing that the celestial body at a distance of 1,300 kilometers from the mother object actually belonged to it.
For another co-steroid 2 kilometers in diameter They were discovered in 2014, 500 kilometers from Elektra, and now a third moon has been identified, so Elektra can now be interpreted as a quadruple astoroid system.
While the other two moons orbit in a roughly circular orbit, the third and fourth describe an eccentric, egg-shaped ellipse. The newly detected celestial body is about 1.6 kilometers wide and orbits Elektra at 344 kilometers every 16 hours.
The discovery was made by dr. It was done by Anthony Berdeu, who used the algorithms he developed using the archives of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. ditch in its communication.
The algorithms in question reduce the glare of the light from the main asteroid and remove them from the image, making even fainter objects visible. Interestingly, the same method was used in the 2014 research, but it was not expected that the procedure could be effective again in eight years.
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