A rock that form in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter seems to have somehow go to the orbit of Neptune , according to a new observation .
When scientists first observed the 291 - kilometre - wide asteroid dub “ 2004 EW95 , ” they immediately recognise something unknown , based on the manner it muse too little ultraviolet light . When they took another tone at it with the Very great Telescope in Chile , it appear to have been made of materials commonly associate with asteroid much closer to the Sun , like branding iron , atomic number 14 , and carbon .
“ It ’s very carbon - fat , ” Thomas Puzia , uranology and astrophysics professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and one of the study ’s authors , told Gizmodo . “ It ’s an asteroid that has been very in all probability flung out from the intimate solar system , and displaced to the outskirt by interactions with the migrating satellite . ”
Planets and asteroid are commonly composed from the material that was uncommitted in the part where they formed — but there ’s more to it than that . One solar organisation theorymeant to explainwhy the innermost planets attend unlike than scientists expect them to , call the rarified tack hypothesis , posits that Jupiter and Saturn dance nigher and farther from the Sun sometime in their history . Their somberness could have get off a few nearby asteroids sailing outwards , and 2004 EW95 may have been one of those asteroids .
The scientists base their results on several observation of the wavelength of luminousness reflected by the stone , consort to the paper published recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters .
Making the observations was n’t well-off . “ These things are really faint , ” allege Puzia . “ You ’re really pushing the limits of the largest telescopes . ”
One scientist who was not involved in the subject field told Gizmodo that the asteroid nicely equal the prediction of the grand tack idea — but would be interesting to study for other reasonableness . “ 2004 EW95 seems to have retain its primal water cognitive content , making it ideal to understand former Solar System condition , ” Edgard Rivera - Valentin , faculty scientist with Universities Space Research Association at the Lunar and Planetary Institute , secernate Gizmodo in an email .
“ Finding and studying the most primitive of these objects lets us well understand where we come from and how we scram here , ” he said .
Puzia remind me to take his squad ’s results with a grain of salinity — it ’s just one observation . “ The next pace is to do large resume and valuate the statistical distribution of these objects with this sort of chemical science in the outskirts of the solar system , ” which could help better confirm the theory . Rivera - Valentin agreed .
If Jupiter and Saturn hopped around early in the Solar System ’s history , they might have cause quite a commotion — and this asteroid may be evidence of that cosmic dancing .
[ The Astrophysical Journal Letters ]
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