Webb Founds an Extremely Small Main Belt Asteroid that is Colosseum sized. An international team of European astronomers has detected an Extremely Small Main Belt Asteroid using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
This Main Belt Asteroid, detected by Webb, is around the size of Rome’s Coliseum and measures between 100 to 200 meters (300 to 650 feet) in length.
The researcher’s team used data from the calibration of the MIRI, where they unintentionally detected the interloping asteroid by chance.
The object is possibly the smallest object ever observed by Webb and may be an example of an object measuring less than 1 km (0.6 miles) in length within the main asteroid belt, and is located between Mars and Jupiter. More observations are needed to better characterize this object’s nature and properties.
According to Thomas Müller, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, “The small asteroid is detected completely unexpectedly in publicly available MIRI calibration observations.” He said, “The measurements are some of the first MIRI measurements targeting the ecliptic plane and this work suggests that many new objects will be detected with this instrument.”
These Webb observations were published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. These Webb observations were actually calibration images of the main belt asteroid (10920) 1998 BC1, which astronomers found in 1998, rather than designed to search for new asteroids.
The observations were made to test the performance of certain of MIRI’s filters, but the calibration team considered the observations to have failed for technical reasons because of the brightness of the object and an off-center telescope pointing. Despite this, the researchers used the information from asteroid 10920 to develop and test a new method for estimating an object’s size and constraining its orbit.
(Source – NASA)
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