How does Dimorphose form?

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How does Dimorphose form?

NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with an object smaller than the Didymos binary asteroid system on September 26, 2022. Credit: ESA

The unobserved double asteroid of Didymus and Dimorphos made headlines as the target of NASA’s successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. As new details about the system emerge, astronomers have hypothesized about how this strange double asteroid came to be.


starts with yarn. any solid object If it spins fast enough, it will lose parts of it like Centrifugal force Overpowering gravity. This is especially true of asteroids, which are not very large to begin with and are only loosely bound together. A team of astronomers recently used this fact to propose a plausible formation mechanism for Didymos and Dimorphos.

In this scenario from long ago, Didymus was spun too quickly. It could be due to a lightning crash or just a lot of crashing gravitational interactions With the neighbors. Once spun, it began to lose its mass, which formed a ring around it. Initially, this ring will be in the asteroid’s so-called Roche limit. The Roche limit is where the tidal and gravitational force from the parent body is stronger than the ability of the materials orbiting it to hold together. So within the limits of Roche Dimorphos could not form.

But through many interactions, some material can migrate away from the ring and past the Roche limit where it will eventually coalesce. That material that escaped would eventually become the young moon Dimorphos.

the Astronomy scientists He estimated that Didymus would have had to lose at least 25% of his mass in order to form Dimorphos in this way. This model also predicts that Dimorphos would have a very irregular shape because it was built from the slow accretion of many smaller objects, which is consistent with what we observe.

The study has been published on arXiv Prepress server.

While NASA’s DART mission has been generally successful, demonstrating that we can definitively push an asteroid’s orbit if we need to, the mission has another side benefit. It helps us explore the intricate and intricate lives of some of the smallest, and often overlooked, organisms in the solar system.

more information:
Gustavo Madeira et al., Dynamic origin of Dimorphus from the rapidly spinning Didymus, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2301.02121

Journal information:
arXiv

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the universe today

the quote: How does Dimorphose form? (2023, January 17) Retrieved January 17, 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2023-01-dimorphos.html

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