An undergraduate astronomy class found an unstudied asteroid is actually a pair of asteroids that "orbit and eclipse" one another.
Less than 100 asteroids of this kind have been seen in the main asteroid belt, a University of Maryland news release reported.
"This is a fantastic discovery," said University of Maryland Astronomy Professor Drake Deming, who was not involved with the class, said in the news release. "A binary asteroid with such an unusual lightcurve is pretty rare. It provides an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the physical properties and orbital evolution of these objects."
"Actually contributing to the scientific community and seeing established scientists getting legitimately excited about our findings is a very good feeling," Terence Basile, a junior from Beltsville, MD majoring in cell biology, said.
The objects, dubbed 3905 Doppler, where first discovered in 1985; up until now researchers had no idea they were an eclipsing binary asteroid.
The class observed the asteroid through a telescope in Spain that they were able to access over the internet. Their assignment was to document intensities differences in light reflected off the asteroids and to turn the images into a lightcurve ("a graph of a celestial object's brightness over time").
By recording these changes in light researchers can often determine the shape of a space objet and the speed it is moving at.
"When we looked at the images we didn't realize we had anything special, because the brightness difference is not something you can see with your eyes," Melissa Hayes-Gehrke, who taught the class, said.
When the students charted 3905 Doppler's lightcurve, but were confused by the fact that the light seemed to disappear at unexpected points.
"It was incredibly frustrating," Alec Bartek, a senior physics major from Brookeville, MD. "For some reason our light curve didn't look right."
Hayes-Gehrke suspected the object was actually two asteroids, and one would occasionally block the light of the other.
"Even then I was not fully aware of how special the discovery was," sophomore economics major Brady Bent of Arbutus, MD, said. "I thought it just meant we would have to do more work. As we continued to analyze our data, other professors in the Astronomy Department came over to view our work. At this point I understood just how rare our find was."
The team believes the asteroids are "potato shaped" and complete an orbit every 51 or so hours.
"Picking the asteroid was luck," Hayes-Gehrke said. "That's the whole point of the class. I'm hoping they'll keep in mind, when they read about scientific results, that it's not a cut-and-dried process, but the scientist probably had to go through some kind of struggle to get results."
