Asteroids in unusual orbits

Although most asteroids travel in fairly circular orbits, there are notable exceptions. In addition to the near-Earth asteroids, some objects are known to travel in orbits that extend far inside or outside the main belt. One of the most extreme is (3200) Phaethon, the first asteroid to be discovered by a spacecraft (the Infrared Astronomical Satellite in 1983). Phaethon approaches to within 0.14 AU of the Sun, well within the perihelion distance of 0.31 AU for Mercury, the innermost planet. By contrast, Phaethon’s aphelion distance of 2.4 AU is in the main asteroid belt. That object is the parent body of the Geminid meteor stream, the concentration of meteoroids responsible for the annual Geminid meteor shower seen on Earth each December. Because the parent bodies of all other meteor streams identified to date are comets, Phaethon is considered by some to be a defunct comet—one that has lost its volatile materials and no longer displays the classic cometary features of a nebulous coma and a tail. Another asteroid, (944) Hidalgo, is also thought by some to be a defunct comet because of its unusual orbit. That object, discovered in 1920, travels sunward as near as 2.02 AU, which is at the inner edge of the main asteroid belt, and as far as 9.68 AU, which is just beyond the orbit of Saturn, at 9.54 AU.

In contrast to the examples of Phaethon and Hidalgo is Chiron, which, following its discovery in 1977, was classified as an asteroid, (2060) Chiron. In 1989 the object was observed to have a dusty coma surrounding it, and in 1991 the presence of cyanogen radicals was detected, a known constituent of the gas comas of comets. Chiron travels in an orbit that lies wholly exterior to the asteroid belt, having a perihelion distance of 8.43 AU (inside the orbit of Saturn) and an aphelion distance of 18.8 AU, which nearly reaches the orbit of Uranus at 19.2 AU. At the time of its discovery, Chiron was the most-distant asteroid known. Within a few years additional objects were discovered traveling among the orbits of the giant planets. It is now known that Chiron belongs to a group collectively referred to as Centaur objects, all of which have elongated orbits with perihelia outside the orbit of Jupiter and aphelia near the orbit of Uranus or Neptune. Centaurs are thought to be icy bodies—in essence, giant comet nuclei—that have been gravitationally perturbed out of the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune and presently travel mainly between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. All Centaurs move in chaotic planet-orbit-crossing orbits. Their orbits will evolve away from the Centaur region, and they will eventually collide with the Sun or a planet or be permanently ejected from the solar system. By 2020 there were 1,175 known Centaurs.

Asteroids traditionally have been distinguished from comets by characteristics based on physical differences, location in the solar system, and orbital properties. An object is classified as a comet when it displays “cometary activity”—i.e., a coma or tail (or any evidence of gas or dust coming from it). Objects in the Kuiper belt, all of which have mean distances from the Sun greater than that of Neptune, are considered to be comet nuclei. Because of their great distance from the Sun, however, they do not display the characteristic activity of comets. In addition, any object on a nonreturning orbit (a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit, rather than an elliptical one) is generally considered to be a comet.

Although such distinctions apply most of the time, they are not always sufficient to classify an individual object as an asteroid or a comet. For example, an object found to be receding from the Sun on a nonreturning orbit and displaying no cometary activity could be a comet, or it could be a planet-crossing asteroid being ejected from the solar system after a close encounter with a planet, most likely Jupiter. Again, objects on some planet-crossing orbits may have originated in either the Kuiper belt or the main asteroid belt. Unless such an object reveals itself by displaying cometary activity, there is usually no way to determine its origin and thus to classify it unequivocally. The object may have formed as an icy body but lost its volatile materials during a series of passes into the inner solar system. Its burned-out remnant of rocky material would presently have more physical characteristics in common with asteroids than with other comets.

The next group of asteroids to be recognized were the Kuiper belt objects (KBOs), or trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), objects that have semimajor axes greater than that of the planet Neptune. Although not realized at the time, (134340) Pluto, discovered in 1930, was the first KBO. By 2020 more than 2,500 KBOs were known. The largest known TNOs are (136199) Eris and Pluto, of nearly equal size, followed by (136472) Makemake and (136108) Haumea. Those four TNOs, together with the asteroid Ceres, are known as dwarf planets. That is, they are physically as much “planets” as Mercury or Mars, but they have not “cleared their orbital region of other objects,” an additional requirement for “planethood” imposed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006.

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There are the main-belt comets (also called active asteroids), the first member of which, 133P/(7968) Elst-Pizarro, was discovered in 1996 when that “asteroid’s” cometlike activity was first noted. Main-belt comets have orbits in the main asteroid belt but exhibit cometary activity such as comae and tails.

Objects have even been discovered passing through the solar system on their journey through interstellar space. Two such interstellar objects have been discovered. One, Comet Borisov, was much like comets of the solar system, but the other, ‘Oumuamua, was possibly a piece of a body like Pluto but with its origin in the Kuiper belt of another star.

Asteroids as individual worlds

The first measurements of the sizes of individual asteroids were made in the last years of the 19th century. A filar micrometer, an instrument normally used in conjunction with a telescope for visual measurement of the separations of double stars, was employed to estimate the diameters of the first four known asteroids. The results established that Ceres was the largest asteroid, having a diameter estimated to be nearly 800 km (500 miles). Those values remained the best available until new techniques for finding albedos (reflectivities) and diameters, based on infrared radiometry and polarization measurements, were introduced beginning about 1970 (see below Size and albedo). The first four asteroids came to be known as the “big four,” and, because all other asteroids were much fainter, they all were believed to be considerably smaller as well.

The first asteroid to have its mass determined was Vesta—in 1966 from measurements of its perturbation of the orbit of asteroid (197) Arete. The first mineralogical determination of the surface composition of an asteroid was made in 1969 when spectral reflectance measurements (see below Composition) identified the mineral pyroxene in the surface material of Vesta.

Classification of asteroids

In the mid-1970s astronomers using information gathered from studies of colour, spectral reflectance, and albedo recognized that asteroids could be grouped into three broad taxonomic classes, designated C, S, and M. At that time they estimated that about 75 percent belonged to class C, 15 percent to class S, and 5 percent to class M. The remaining 5 percent were unclassifiable because of either poor data or genuinely unusual properties. Furthermore, they noted that the S class dominated the population at the inner edge of the asteroid belt, whereas the C class was dominant in the middle and outer regions of the belt.

Within a decade that taxonomic system was expanded, and it was recognized that the asteroid belt comprised overlapping rings of differing taxonomic classes, with classes designated S, C, P, and D dominating the populations at distances from the Sun of about 2, 3, 4, and 5 AU, respectively. As more data became available from further observations, additional minor classes were recognized. For discussion of the relationship of the asteroid classes to their composition, see below Composition.