[meteorite-list] Asteroid Caught Marching Across Tadpole Nebula (1719 Jens)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 13 May 2010 11:55:37 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201005131855.o4DItbZk017694_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-161

Asteroid Caught Marching Across Tadpole Nebula
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
May 13, 2010

A new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or
WISE, showcases the Tadpole nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga
constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the
sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to
catch an asteroid in our solar system passing by. The asteroid, called
1719 Jens, left tracks across the image, seen as a line of yellow-green
dots in the boxes near center. A second asteroid was also observed
cruising by, as highlighted in the boxes near the upper left (the larger
boxes are blown-up versions of the smaller ones).

But that's not all that WISE caught in this busy image -- two satellites
orbiting above WISE (highlighted in the ovals) streak through the image,
appearing as faint green trails. The apparent motion of asteroids is
slower than satellites because asteroids are much more distant, and thus
appear as dots that move from one WISE frame to the next, rather than
streaks in a single frame.

This Tadpole region is chock full of stars as young as only a million
years old -- infants in stellar terms -- and masses over 10 times that
of our sun. It is called the Tadpole nebula because the masses of hot,
young stars are blasting out ultraviolet radiation that has etched the
gas into two tadpole-shaped pillars, called Sim 129 and Sim 130. These
"tadpoles" appear as the yellow squiggles near the center of the frame.
The knotted regions at their heads are likely to contain new young
stars. WISE's infrared vision is helping to ferret out hidden stars such
as these.

The 1719 Jens asteroid, discovered in 1950, orbits in the main asteroid
belt between Mars and Jupiter. The space rock, which has a diameter of
19 kilometers (12 miles), rotates every 5.9 hours and orbits the sun
every 4.3 years.

Twenty-five frames of the region, taken at all four of the wavelengths
detected by WISE, were combined into this one image. The space telescope
caught 1719 Jens in 11 successive frames. Infrared light of 3.4 microns
is color-coded blue: 4.6-micron light is cyan; 12-micron-light is green;
and 22-micron light is red.

WISE is an all-sky survey, snapping pictures of the whole sky, including
everything from asteroids to stars to powerful, distant galaxies.

JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The
principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was
competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was
built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft
was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science
operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and
Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and
http://wise.astro.ucla.edu .

Whitney Clavin (818) 354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin at jpl.nasa.gov

2010-161
Received on Thu 13 May 2010 02:55:37 PM PDT