From the «weirder and weirder» department:
Feed: SoylentNews
Title: Mysterious Near-Earth Asteroid Phaethon Just Got Even Weirder
Author: hubie
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2023 04:25:00 -0400
Link: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=23/04/27/0229246&from=rss

upstart[1] writes:

New observations of the rock show its comet-like tail is not made of dust, possibly altering the origin story of the Geminid meteor shower[2]:

A comet-like asteroid has been flaunting a tail of material as it approaches the Sun. But unlike its cometary counterparts, a fresh look at asteroid Phaethon reveals, this tail is made of sodium rather than dust, as was previously thought.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint mission between NASA
and the European Space Agency, recorded new observations[3] of Phaethon as it passed near the Sun in May 2022. SOHO's Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph imaged the asteroid using different filters: one that detects dust and another that detects sodium.

[...] Phaethon's sodium tail adds even more mystery to this strange object.
The asteroid was discovered in 1983 and named after the son of the Greek Sun god Helios for its close proximity to the star. Although classified as an asteroid, Phaethon has been showing some comet-like behavior. The rock is the likely origin of the Geminid meteor shower, which streaks across the sky in December. Most meteor showers, however, are produced by comets as a trail of debris left behind during their solar flyby.

[...] The discovery of sodium in Phaethon's tail could also hold clues to the origin of its meteor shower. Scientists had previously thought that the asteroid's tail is what crated the Geminid meteor shower, but the latest observations show that the asteroid doesn't shed enough dust for the shower to form. Instead, the researchers behind the new study suggest that a piece of Phaethon broke off around a few thousand years ago, causing the asteroid to eject a stream of billions of bits that make up the Geminids.

Scientists are set to gather more data on Phaethon through an upcoming mission to the asteroid. The Japanese space agency is sending the DESTINY+ mission to the celestial body in 2028 in an attempt to image its surface.

Journal Reference: Qicheng Zhang et al 2023 Planet. Sci. J. 4 70 DOI 10.3847/PSJ/acc866[4]

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Original Submission[5]

Read more of this story[6] at SoylentNews.

Links:
[1]: https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/ (link)
[2]: https://gizmodo.com/phaethon-asteroid-tail-sodium-geminid-meteor-shower-1850374590 (link)
[3]: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/SOHO_chases_asteroid_s_tail (link)
[4]: https://doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/acc866 (link)
[5]: https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsubsubid=59419 (link)
[6]: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=23/04/27/0229246&from=rss (link)



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