The moons recently captured by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft are incredibly elusive satellites of asteroids.
The Gaia spacecraft is a powerful space observatory tasked with mapping the Milky Way galaxy, which contains Earth. In addition to identifying and tracking billions of stars, it has recently brought back astonishing data about 353 previously unknown moons.
This image shows the orbits of some known asteroids forming tangled “web-like” rings surrounding the Sun – (Photo: ESA).
These are not moons of planets like Earth’s Moon or Jupiter’s Europa and Ganymede.
They are moons of asteroids, which means they are small space rocks orbiting larger space rocks, forming parent-child asteroid pairs.
A well-known example of this type of moon is Dimorphos, a satellite of Didymos and also the “victim” of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) conducted in 2022.
According to Live Science, ESA’s recent announcement reveals that 352 moons have been discovered orbiting previously believed single asteroids within the Solar System.
This breakthrough demonstrates that the star surveyor is capable of performing “blind searches” to identify tiny “child” asteroids.
These are only preliminary observations. If the data is confirmed, the number of known binary asteroids in the Solar System will double.
If these new observations are validated, these 352 pairs will nearly double the number of known binary asteroid systems in the Solar System.
“Binary asteroids are very hard to find because they are often very small and far away from us” – Dr. Luana Liberato from the Côte d’Azur Observatory (France), the lead researcher, stated.
They believe that nearly 1/6 of asteroids are not alone, but so far, only over 500 pairs are known among the billion asteroids wandering in the Solar System.
“But this discovery shows that there are many more asteroids out there waiting to be discovered” – Dr. Liberato added.
