This Weird, Bone-Shaped Asteroid May Have Given Birth to Its Own Moons
Not all asteroids are built alike. Some, however, are so far from alike that they have officially crossed the line into wonderfully weird.
Such is the case for an asteroid named Kleopatra, otherwise hanging out quite normally in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. It consists of two lobes, connected by a long neck – a morphology that has earned it the nickname "dog bone asteroid".
This unusual-looking space rock even has two small moons of its own – AlexHelios and CleoSelene, named after the children of ancient Egypt's famous Pharaoh, Cleopatra.
We've known about this incredible space oddity for about two decades, but scientists have now obtained the most detailed images of it we've seen yet. This is helping us figure out how Kleopatra formed, and the results suggest that the moons were born from Kleopatra's own material.
"Kleopatra is truly a unique body in our Solar System," said astronomer Franck Marchis of the SETI Institute and the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille in France.
