In the solar system discovered a new planet

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have announced the discovery of a new dwarf planet Hygiea in the solar system, the tiniest such object known to us. Writes about this with the BBC.

Фото: Depositphotos

Hygea, named after the ancient Greek goddess of health, is located in the main belt of asteroids revolving around the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The diameter of the dwarf planet is only about 430 km.

Strictly speaking, the first Gigeyu was discovered by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis as far back as 170 years ago, in 1849, but until today it was officially considered an asteroid.

The reason for the official change in classification was that scientists were able to examine Hygiea in detail for the first time using the Very Large Telescope (VLT - Very Large Telescope), installed at the Paranal Observatory, in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

Fate of pluto

Hygea is not the largest object in the asteroid belt. In size it is inferior to Ceres (950 km), Vesta (525 km) and Pallas (512 km).

Until the beginning of the 19th century, all three were considered real planets, but later they were “demoted” to asteroids.

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The current classification of celestial bodies was adopted in 2006 at the assembly of the International Astronomical Union.

To be considered a planet, a celestial body must fulfill several conditions:

• orbit around the sun;
• while not being a satellite of another planet;
• have sufficient gravity to maintain a round (or close to round) shape;
• possess enough mass to clear its orbit from other, smaller objects.

If only the first three conditions are satisfied, the planet is considered dwarf.

Exactly for this reason, in 2006, Pluto (diameter - 2400 km) officially lost its planetary status. Along with it, three more trans-Neptunian (located further from the Sun than Neptune) objects received the status of a dwarf planet - Haumea, Eris and Makemake (all of them have their own satellites).

In the asteroid belt, only Ceres is recognized as a dwarf planet. Vesta and Pallas were not round enough for this. But Hygeia, which is inferior in size to them, as it has now turned out, has an almost ideal spherical shape - and therefore meets the definition of a dwarf planet.

Corresponding Research Article was published in the journal Nature Astronomy, but the new status of Hygea has yet to be officially approved by the International Astronomical Union, which will meet in 2021 in Korean Busan.

Head-on collision

To astronomers' surprise, there was no huge crater discovered on the surface of Gigeyi, which they expected to see there.

The fact is that its asteroid family includes almost 7000 other small objects that broke away from the same parent celestial body. Scientists assumed that the impact that resulted in the formation of the entire family should have left a deep scar on Hygeia - as happened in the case of Vesta.

However, having studied 95% of the surface of Hygea, they found only two relatively small craters there.

“None of them could have been formed by the impact that produced this family of asteroids, the total volume of which is comparable to that of a celestial body with a diameter of 100 km,” explains Miroslav Broz, a professor at Charles University in Prague and one of the authors of the Nature Astronomy paper. “They are too small for that.”

Having considered several possible options, scientists came to the conclusion that Hygea and her huge family were formed about 2 billion years ago as a result of a head-on collision with a celestial body with a diameter of 75-150 km.

The maternal object was completely destroyed, giving rise to thousands of small asteroid fragments. But some of them were close enough to form a round dwarf planet under the influence of gravity.

According to doctoral candidate at Charles University and co-author of the article, Pavel Shevechek, this is the only collision of this magnitude in the asteroid belt over the last 3-4 billion years.

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