An Asteroid has Been Discovered With Three Moons!

asteroids can have moons as well. The new four-body system makes the three-body problem look simple.

The asteroid has a diameter of 200 km and a weight of 7 x 1018 km.

The year they were first observed is reflected in their designation, which shows that S/2014(130) 2 sat unobserved in a dataset for seven years.

There are two answers to that question. The signal for the moon was hidden even when the data was reduced.

Reducing the amount of data while analyzing it is commonplace in spectrography. Data sets have optical artifacts that aren't necessarily of interest to certain studies, which is why Dr. Berdeu and his team used a novel data reduction technique.

It reached far enough out from the asteroid that it could see it.

The scientists were able to remove the modeled light levels from any captured image of the target by using a point spread function.

This data reduction and halo elimination technique can be used on other asteroid observations as well and can be used after the data has been collected.

You can learn more.

The first observation of a quadruple asteroid was made by Berdeu et al.

The first quadruple asteroid has a space rock with three moons.

The first known Quadruple Asteroid System has Scientist spots.