Asteroid and comet studies

Paul Wiegert
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Western Ontario, London ON CANADA

Telescopic studies of asteroids and comets continue to reveal new information about the nature of our Solar System. At the left is an animation of three images of a portion of the sky, spaced about an hour apart. These are the discovery images of a small main-belt asteroid discovered by my group. The images were taken with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea Hawaii as part of the CFHT Legacy Survey.

The asteroid, indicated by the red arrow, was caught passing in front of dramatic spiral galaxy IRAS 13402-1111, an ensemble of hundreds of millions of stars, all approximately 1 000 000 000 000 times further from us than the asteroid itself. This asteroid was part of a study of hundreds of asteroids, many of them discovered during our project, to investigate the size distribution and colours of small main belt asteroids. Click here for an even bigger view.