An
international team of astronomers led by Dr. William Merline of
the Boulder office of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) released
today the first-ever images of a large, double asteroid.
Each asteroid in the pair is the size of a large city, separated
by about 160 km, mutually orbiting the vacant point of interplanetary
space that lies midway between them. The asteroid pair was once
assumed to be a single body, called Antiope, orbiting the sun in
the outer parts of the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars
and Jupiter.
|