{"id":1968,"date":"2017-10-03T21:35:06","date_gmt":"2017-10-04T04:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/?p=1968"},"modified":"2017-09-22T21:55:18","modified_gmt":"2017-09-23T04:55:18","slug":"binary-asteroid-comet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/?p=1968","title":{"rendered":"Binary Asteroid Comet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a lot of interesting things to see in outer space and the\u00c2\u00a0NASA\/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.<\/p>\n<p>In September 2016\u00c2\u00a0the asteroid 288P came close enough to the planet Earth for a detailed look at it&#8217;s physical features. What the astronomers saw was astonishing because it wasn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not all that was special about the situation. Apparently the binary asteroid system\u00c2\u00a0exhibited comet-like features, including a bright coma and a long tail. This helped them classify\u00c2\u00a0288P as the first known binary asteroid which is also considered a main-belt comet.<\/p>\n<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/ezinearticles.com\/?High-School-Science-Project-Presentations---6-Secrets-to-Success&amp;id=1784284\">scientific study<\/a> of the binary asteroids will help astronomers better understand the\u00c2\u00a0formation and evolution of the whole Solar System.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a lot of interesting things to see in outer space and the\u00c2\u00a0NASA\/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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1969,"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions\/1969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awesomescienceprojects.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}