NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected an asteroid between 300 and 650 feet in length. This is the smallest object ever detected by the Webb Telescope. The discovery was made by a team of European scientists using Medium Infrared Infrared (MIRI) data. It has been dubbed an “interlaced” asteroid. Notably, it lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. However, NASA says that further observations are needed to fully understand its features.
“We — to our surprise — discovered a small planet Thomas Müller, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany explains.
NASA said in a blog post“The discovery of this asteroid — which the team suspects is the smallest asteroid observed by Webb to date and one of the smallest discovered in the main belt —, if confirmed, is a new asteroid, which will have important implications for our understanding of the formation and evolution of the solar system.”
Although current models predict the presence of small planet At all sizes, small asteroids are less noticeable than larger asteroids because they are difficult to observe. With future-focused observations using Webb, astronomers will be able to examine asteroids smaller than 1 km.
The interesting part is the result of Webb telescope also shows a great contribution in the discovery of new asteroids. To confirm that the detected object is a new asteroid, additional location data regarding the background stars is needed from further studies to determine its orbit, NASA said.
The NASA report adds: “Further, this result suggests that Webb will also be able to contribute incidentally to the discovery of new asteroids. The team doubts that even these observations The short near-plane MIRI of the solar system will always include a few asteroids, most of which will be unidentified objects.”
What is an asteroid: NASA explains
An asteroid is an airless rocky remnant left over from the early formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most asteroids can be found orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt.
