{"id":127526,"date":"2021-09-10T23:23:04","date_gmt":"2021-09-11T06:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/astronomers-take-best-pictures-of-kleopatras-portrait"},"modified":"2021-09-10T23:23:04","modified_gmt":"2021-09-11T06:23:04","slug":"astronomers-take-best-pictures-of-kleopatras-portrait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/astronomers-take-best-pictures-of-kleopatras-portrait","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers take best pictures of Kleopatra\u2019s \u2018portrait\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The huge \u201cdog-boned\u201d asteroid hurling through the solar system has now been imaged in unprecedented detail.<\/p>\n

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A team of astronomers has seemingly obtained the best pictures and data to date of the peculiar asteroid, Kleopatra<\/a>. Using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope<\/a> (VLT), observers from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the Laboratoire d\u2019Astrophysique de Marseille, France, captured images to help two teams of scientists answer some interesting questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cKleopatra is truly a unique body in our Solar System,\u201d says Franck Marchis, who led a study on the asteroid published in Astronomy & Astrophysics<\/a><\/em>. \u201cScience makes a lot of progress thanks to the study of weird outliers. I think Kleopatra is one of those and understanding this complex, multiple asteroid system can help us learn more about our Solar System.\u201d<\/p>\n

The asteroid, which orbits in the central region of the asteroid belt<\/a> between Mars and Jupiter, was initially discovered on April 10 1880. However, it wasn\u2019t until just 20 years ago that radar observations revealed it had two lobes which were connected by a thick \u201cneck.\u201d In 2,008 Marchis and his colleagues discovered that the asteroid was orbited by two moons, named AlexHelios and CleoSelene, after the Egyptian queen\u2019s children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The huge \u201cdog-boned\u201d asteroid hurling through the solar system has now been imaged in unprecedented detail. A team of astronomers has seemingly obtained the best pictures and data to date of the peculiar asteroid, Kleopatra. Using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (VLT), observers from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}