HONG KONG: With the help of a pair of giant radio telescopes, scientists have captured eerie new image of an asteroid as it whizzed by Earth last month.
Known formally as 1999 JD6, the space rock is being called a “space peanut” because of its elongated shape and twin lobes.
What explains the lobes?
One possibility is that a couple of “big chunks” came together at some point, asteroid expert Dr. Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope program, told The Huffington Post in an email. Another possibility, she said, is that the asteroid–which is about 1.2 miles across at its widest point–is what’s left over after a larger asteroid survived some kind of impact.
In any case, the peanut shape isn’t particularly unusual.
“Radar imaging has shown that about 15 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than 600 feet [about 180 meters], including 1999 JD6, have this sort of lobed, peanut shape,” Dr. Lance Benner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. and leader of the space agency’s asteroid radar research program, said in a written statement.
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