An international team of European astronomers detected a hitherto unknown asteroid of about 200 metersabout the size of the Colosseum in Rome, wandering around the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
The finding was only possible because the researchers used data from the James Webb Super Telescope.
Although more observations are needed to better characterize the nature and properties of this object, this is probably the smallest celestial body observed by Webb so farsaid the space agencies responsible for the telescope.
The discovery of this ‘extremely small’ body, as the scientists classified it, however, was not deliberate.
The researchers discovered the asteroid while analyzing data from the calibration of the Mid-Infrared Instrument (Mid-Infrared Instrument or MIRI) of the megatelescope was responsible for the discovery.
The equipment is like a camera that sees a mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum at wavelengths greater than what our eyes see.
“We – completely unexpectedly – detected a small asteroid in publicly available MIRI calibration observations,” explained Thomas Müller, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.
“Our work suggests that many new objects will be detected with this instrument,” he added.
If these findings are confirmed, the discovery of this asteroid – one of the smallest in the asteroid belt, a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter – could have significant implications for our understanding of how the Solar System formed and evolved over time.
Also according to the scientists, historically, as larger asteroids have been studied in less detail than smaller ones, due to the difficulty of observing these objects, future Webb observations will allow astronomers to analyze asteroids smaller than 1 kilometer in size.
“This is a fantastic result that highlights MIRI’s ability to accidentally detect a previously undetectable asteroid in the asteroid belt,” concluded Bryan Holler, Webb Support Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
“Replays of these observations are in the scheduling process and we expect new intruder asteroids in these images.”
