Behold, This Is The First Asteroid Ever Discovered to Have Three Moons

The most crowded asteroid we have ever found was discovered in the 19th century.

Astronomers have just discovered that it has not one, nor two, but three smaller satellite companions, or moons. That makes it the most numerous asteroid system known to date, and demonstrates how we might find other faint, hard-to-see asteroid moons in the future.

The first quadruple system ever detected was found by a team led by Anthony Berdeu of the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand.

This new detection shows that dedicated data reduction and processing algorithms modeling the physics of the instruments can push their contrast limits further.

It is not uncommon for asteroids to have smaller companions. Over 150 asteroids are known to have at least one moon.

The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was first discovered in 1873, but the first moon, named S/2003 (130) 1, wasn't discovered until 130 years later. The second moon, S/2014 (130) 1, was discovered in the year 2014).

It takes a while to find these satellites. At the best of times, asteroids are small and only dimly lit. Anything smaller than an asteroid is going to be dimmer, fainter, and vastly outshone by its parent asteroid.

The closer the moon is to the asteroid, the harder it will be to see. It is similar to the reason why it is hard to see exoplanets.

S/2003 (130) 1 is only 6 kilometers across and has an average distance of 1,300 kilometers, while S/2014 (130) 1 is only 2 kilometers across and has an average distance of 500 kilometers.

The asteroid has three moons. ESO/Berdeu et al., Yang et al.

The newly discovered moon is just 1.6 kilometers across and has an average orbital distance of 340 kilometers. It is 15,000 times fainter than Elektra.

To find it, Berdeu and his colleagues took archival data from the SPHERE instrument attached to the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and ran it through a newly developed data reduction pipeline to remove noise from the raw data.

They used data processing to model the extended glow around the asteroid and remove it.

The third moon of Elektra emerged after the data had been processed.

Although the team was able to get some basic information, there is still a lot of uncertainty about its motion. We do not have a lot of information about how these systems form.

A study last year found that the two moons of an asteroid named Kleopatra probably formed from dust ejected by the main body, but we don't know how common this is compared to other formation mechanisms.

Rocks getting ejected during an impact event, or even capture of small passing rocks in the asteroid's gravitational field are some of the possibilities.

The researchers wrote in their paper that the discovery of the first quadruple asteroid system slightly opens the way for understanding the mechanisms of the formation of these satellites.

Their techniques could be used in future studies to find more asteroid moons.

The research was published in a journal.