Rare Eclipsing Double Asteroid Discovered

Students in a University of Maryland undergraduate astronomy class have made a rare discovery that wowed professional astronomers: a previously unstudied asteroid is actually a pair of asteroids that orbit and regularly eclipse one another.

Fewer than 100 asteroids of this type have been identified in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, said Melissa Hayes-Gehrke, who teaches the hands-on class for non-astronomy majors in which eight students made the find in the fall semester 2013.
The students’ discovery that 3905 Doppler is an eclipsing binary asteroid will be presented in a poster session Jan. 7 at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland and published in April in the Minor Planet Bulletin.

In this artist’s rendering, the newly-identified binary asteroid 3905 Doppler approaches an eclipse as the larger asteroid begins to pass in front of the smaller one, as seen from a vantage point on Earth. Credit: Loretta Kuo

“This is a fantastic discovery,” said University of Maryland Astronomy Prof. Drake Deming, who was not involved with the class. “A binary asteroid with such an unusual lightcurve is pretty rare. It provides an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the physical properties and orbital evolution of these objects.”

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Read more here: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-undergraduates-rare-eclipsing-asteroid.html

Provided by University of Maryland