There’s a lot of interesting things to see in outer space and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope continues to bring these to our attention. Not all of them are very far away. A group of German scientists have recently studied an interesting phenomena in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in our Solar System.

In September 2016 the asteroid 288P came close enough to the planet Earth for a detailed look at it’s physical features. What the astronomers saw was astonishing because it wasn’t just one asteroid, but a binary pair. The two asteroids seem to be of the same mass and size. They are orbiting each other at a distance of about 100 kilometres.

That’s not all that was special about the situation. Apparently the binary asteroid system exhibited comet-like features, including a bright coma and a long tail. This helped them classify 288P as the first known binary asteroid which is also considered a main-belt comet.

The study of main belt comets offers a great deal of knowledge about how the Solar System initially evolved. In fact it is believed that water reached the planet Earth via main belt comets. This scientific study of the binary asteroids will help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of the whole Solar System.