They found possible satellites among more than 350 asteroids | Tech Doctor | Magazine

ESA’s Gaia mission, which focuses on stellar exploration, has also detected possible satellites around more than 350 asteroids with no known companion stars.

Gaia has previously explored asteroids with satellites (so-called “binary asteroids”) and confirmed that signs of these tiny moons appeared in the telescope’s ultra-precise astrometric data. But this new discovery suggests that Gaia can also perform “blind” searches to discover entirely new candidates.., detail Euronews.

“Binary asteroids are difficult to find because most of them are very small and very far away,” Luana Liberato of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, lead author of the new study, said in a statement.

“While we expect fewer than one in six asteroids to have a companion, we have only discovered 500 of the 1 billion known asteroids in binary systems to date. But the discovery shows that there are many more asteroid satellites waiting to be discovered.“, he added.

If confirmed, the new discovery would add 352 binary candidates to the count, nearly doubling the number of known asteroids with moons.

Asteroids are fascinating celestial objects that contain unique information about the formation and evolution of the Solar System.Binary stars are even more exciting because they allow us to study how different objects form, collide, and interact in space.

With its unique all-sky scanning capability, Gaia has made many important asteroid discoveries since its launch in 2013.

In its third data release, Gaia pinpointed the positions and motions of more than 150,000 asteroids so precisely that scientists were able to dig deeper and look for those that exhibit a characteristic “wobble” caused by the gravity of a companion star in orbit (the same mechanism that underlies the binary shown here).

Gaia also collected data on the asteroid’s chemistry, compiling the largest “reflectance spectrum” (a light curve that reveals an object’s color and composition) of an asteroid to date.

More than 150,000 orbits determined in Gaia’s third data release were refined to a 20-fold improvement in accuracy as part of a mission-specific product released last year. Additional asteroid orbits are expected to be acquired as part of the upcoming Gaia 4 data release (expected no earlier than mid-2026). (I)