216 Kleopatra -Asteriod has its own moons?!

I'm going to review this thread later tonight but I have a couple of curious points that first strike me. I read on a NASA site that metal floating freely in space, debris even will fuse with metal that gets close enough, given relative sizes that sort of makes extravehicular repairs difficult, outside of the obvious bulky suits and gloves. Like magnets metal attracts metal in space, I suppose with enough mass the metal will fuse together.

I'm wondering how this asteroid rotates. Is it spinning ball over ball end like a baton twirling or is is spinning around like if it was a barbell rolling on a floor? I would buy an impact that almost separated to create it's shape, it is quite sizable, and if so I could see it twirling like a baton. I know lots of asteroid have potato and unusual fragmented shapes and I'm wondering if that image isn't just a computer animation/rendering. Two highly metallic asteroids crashing at this size would create a lot of impact heat but in the cold of space with two dead bodies cooling would be very rapid, and it kind of looks like cooling kept the fuse together before inertia broke it apart, purely layman conjecture.

This leads me to wonder about the orbital paths of the moons of this asteroid, this group could be one crazy haphazard group of bodies with all kinds of momentum forces creating bizarre local gravitational fluxes.

Anyway, quite an interesting group.

reply to post by Illustronic


Based on this, it would seem that Kleo rotates end-over-end, exactly as would be expected from an asteroid resulting from a collision.

reply to post by CLPrime


It makes sense that it would have primarily been gravity that pulled tow asteroids together to form Kleo, but magnetic attraction might have been a significant factor in the fusion process.

I think our understanding of these forces is still very primitive.

I would think that such an unusually formed planetoid, if that is how it is qualified, who be an excellent choice for study. I wonder if there are serious plans within NASA to gather a great deal more information on this object.

reply to post by CLPrime


From the link you provided, it appears that a bit of my post is valid. What crazy orbits it's moons must have, no wonder this system drew attention.

So we instead suspect that two or more core pieces from that huge protoasteroid impact gently collided afterwards, or perhaps went into orbit around each and then gradually got closer and collided. We'd then have an elongated metal "rubble pile," a rotating clump of nickel-iron chunks held together by their mutual gravitational attraction.

But what I was referencing is not only gravitational attraction, but metallic attraction in the void of deep space. I just stumble across things from time to time and some points I retain, so finding links I read could prove difficult because I have no time frame as to when I read such articles, and it's not my field of study. Now isn't iron and nickel the heaviest elements created by a 2nd generation star nebula, one that our solar system may have been formed from?

Search was my friend.

Great find. I love this stuff. Something new almost daily (from Space).

S&F!

reply to post by poet1b
reply to post by Illustronic


I was just thinking... what if it was gravity (and a very unfortunate crossing of paths) that brought them together, but they had magnetically opposite charges? That could be the factor responsible for the elongated bit between them - if, in the process of fusing, their opposing charges pushed them apart, leading to the stretched-out dumbbell shape.