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The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has revealed the sharpest ever images of 42 of the largest asteroids in our solar system with the number and date of release chosen in tribute to author Douglas Adams.
These detailed images were captured by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) which is in Chile rather than Europe, located high in the Atacama desert where there are clear skies and views of space.
Most of the asteroids, from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, are larger than 100km in size, with the largest, Ceres and Vesta, measuring 940km and 520km across respectively.
The images allowed the team to realise that asteroids are divided into two families – the almost perfectly spherical, such as Ceres and Hygiea, and the elongated, with the “dog-bone” asteroid Kleopatra the best example of those.
The researchers combined the shapes of the asteroids with information about their masses and found that the density of the objects ranged considerably across the sample of 42.
Four of the least dense asteroids had a density of about 1.3 grams per cubic centimetre, similar to coal, while the most dense was Kalliope at 4.4 grams per cubic centimetre, higher than the density of diamond.
The range of densities offer astronomers important clues about where these asteroids actually came from with competing hypotheses positing they formed elsewhere or from the fragments of a number of planets that had previously existed in that region of…
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Source : skynews
