Asteroid Asteroid

The asteroid Lutetia is a leftover fragment of the exact same original material that formed the planet earth, Venus and Mercury, new reports have suggested.

Astronomers have combined files from ESA’s Rosetta space vehicle, ESO’s New Technology Telescope, and NASA telescopes and identified that the properties of the asteroid closely match those of the rare kind of meteorites available on Earth and thought to have got formed in the inner areas of the Solar System.

A group of astronomers from French as well as North American universities have analyzed the unusual asteroid in details at a very wide variety of wavelengths to deduce its composition.

Data from the OSIRIS camera on ESA’s Rosetta ballistic capsule, ESO’s New Technology Scope (NTT) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, as well as NASA’s Infrared Telescope Service in Hawaii and Spitzer Space Telescope were combined to develop the most complete spectrum of an asteroid ever assembled.

This spectrum was then compared with those of meteorites found on Earth that were extensively studied in the clinical and only one type involving meteorite, enstatite chondrites, was discovered to have properties that coordinated Lutetia over the full variety of colours.

Enstatite chondrites are considered material that dates from earlier Solar System, and they are believed to be to have formed close for the young Sun and to are actually a major building block inside the formation of the rocky planets, in particular the Earth, Venus and Mercury.

“But exactly how did Lutetia escape from the inner Solar System and get to the main asteroid belt?” Pierre Vernazza (ESO), charge author of the paper, stated.

Astronomers have estimated that under 2 percent of the bodies located in the region in which Earth formed, ended up however asteroid belt, but most of the bodies of the inner Photo voltaic System disappeared after a couple of million years as they had been incorporated into the young planets that were forming.

However, some of the largest, with diameters of about 100 kilometres or more, ended up ejected to safer orbits further from the Sun.

Lutetia, and that is about 100 kilometres across, was tossed out from the internal parts of the young Photo voltaic System if it passed all-around one of the rocky exoplanets and thus had its scope dramatically altered.

An encounter while using young Jupiter during its migration to its current range could also account for the massive change in Lutetia’s range.

“We think that such an ejection must have happened to Lutetia. It ended up being an interloper in the main asteroid belt and it has been recently preserved there for four billion years.” Vernazza said. (ANI)