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Re: Astronomers Report On Strange Double Asteroid
Ron Baalke schrieb:
> Astronomers Report On Strange Double Asteroid
> Asteroid (216) Kleopatra, first discovered in 1880,
> previously was thought to be a solo dumbbell-shaped object, ...
> but it now appears in infrared images ... to be a pair of bright
> objects closely circling one another, separated by a thin space of
> unknown size.
> Franck Marchis, Daniel Hestroffer and their colleagues ... say ...
> Kleopatra is comprised of two similarly sized lobes, neither of
> which is small enough to be called a moon.
> Full story here:
>
> http://www.space.com/science/astronomy/double_asteroid_991118.html
Hi Ron and List!
The info is not quite brand new, though. See Clifford J. Cunninham's
Introduction to Asteroids, published in 1988. On p. 82, 216 Kleopatra
is described as a triaxial ellipsoid, which is possibly a binary system
with nearly contact components.
And on pp. 90-91: Two amateur astronomers, Garry Ratley and William
Cooke, set up two visual observing sites 0.6 km apart on the night of
10 October 1980. While both were in the wrong location to see the
primary occultation by Kleopatra, they each saw a secondary event
lasting 0.9 seconds and coinciding within 0.7 sec. (Kerr, 1980). They
also reported a change from the bluish character of the asteroid to the
reddish appearance of the star during the event.
Best regards,
Bernd
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