00:00Gaia's mission is a complicated one. It's attempting to chart every star in our galaxy,
00:09which could number upwards of 400 billion. However, more recently, it turned its instruments
00:14inward, looking for asteroids. And boy, did it find some. It's now being reported that the Gaia
00:19mission has identified some 352 additional asteroids whipping around our solar system.
00:24But these asteroids weren't just simple rocks that were previously undetected. According to
00:29their recently released findings, these are asteroid moons, meaning they are asteroids
00:33circling other asteroids, making them binary pairs. That means that the 352 newly minted asteroid moons
00:41nearly doubles the number of previously discovered pairs. The researchers say that binary pairs are
00:46hard to spot, as they're not only small, but also far away. Experts predict that one-sixth of all
00:51asteroids should have a pair. But so far, they've only been able to identify a few hundred of them
00:56amongst the million known. With the researchers adding that this most recent find shows that
01:00there are many more asteroid moons out there just waiting to be found.
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