Earth's First Asteroid Companion Discovered

This is an amazing discovery. Up until now, companion asteroids that more or less share an orbit with Earth have been theoretical. This class of asteroids is known as Trojans; Jupiter has them, and so do Mars and Neptune. Now Earth joins the club with 2010 TK7, an asteroid approximately 300 meters (1000 feet) across and 80 million km (50 million miles) from Earth. Asteroid 2010 TK7 is circled in green, in this single frame taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) managed to notice the small asteroid. WISE sees in the infrared, where...

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Posted in 2010 TK7,Asteroids,awesome,Earth,Trojan,WISE 22 comments

The Largest, Most Distant Water Reservoir Found

This artist's concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM 08279+5255, where astronomers discovered huge amounts of water vapor. Image credit: NASA/ESA  More than 12 billion light years away sits a massive body of water surrounding a large, feeding black hole. The amount of water is equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water on Earth. It also shows an early abundance of water in the Universe, being 12 billion light years away means that the light from this event is 12 billion years old. Early for a 13.75 billion year old Universe. Black holes that are active like this one are known as quasars. Known as...

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Posted in Black Holes,Quasar,Water 16 comments