Hundreds of Asteroid Moons Are Actually Hiding in Our Solar System

Amaze Lab

Gaia’s mission is a complicated one. It’s attempting to chart every star in our galaxy, which could num0ber upwards of 400 billion. However, more recently it turned its instruments inward looking for asteroids and boy did it find some.

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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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