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About 30–35% of the bodies in the asteroid belt belong to dynamical families, each thought to have a common origin in a past collision between asteroids. A family has also been associated with the plutoid dwarf planet Haumea. Some asteroids have unusual horseshoe orbits that are co-orbital with Earth or another planet.
New research has the answer. By studying the composition of meteorites that have landed over the years and the asteroids populating our solar system, astronomers have determined that about 70% of ...
Until 2001, most basaltic bodies discovered in the asteroid belt were believed to originate from the asteroid Vesta (hence their name V-type), but the discovery of the asteroid 1459 Magnya revealed a slightly different chemical composition from the other basaltic asteroids discovered until then, suggesting a different origin. [80]
Outside the top four, the ranking of all the asteroids is uncertain, as there is a great deal of overlap among the estimates. The largest asteroids with an accurately measured mass, because they have been studied by the probe Dawn, are 1 Ceres with a mass of (939.3 ± 0.5) × 10 18 kg, and 4 Vesta at (259.076 ± 0.001) × 10 18 kg.
The researchers are not the first to propose that the space rock belonged to a group of asteroids that formed beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Their findings, however, strengthen the case thanks to a ...
In the moments before NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in a landmark planetary defense test in 2022, it took high-resolution images of this small celestial object and its ...
Based on Paul Herget's The Names of the Minor Planets, [6] Schmadel also researched the unclear origin of numerous asteroids, most of which had been named prior to World War II. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain : SBDB New namings may only be added to this list below after official publication as the ...
Asteroids are the leftovers from when the planets formed in our solar system. Studying their compositions can tell astronomers where in our cosmic neighborhood the asteroids originated ...