Photos from open sources of
We don’t talk about the danger of the asteroid West in this article we will, because, as Anatoly Zaitsev once said – General Director of the Russian “Center for Planetary Defense”, this the heavenly body poses no threat to earthlings.
Let it periodically be remembered when Vesta converges with Earth, when an asteroid is clearly visible even with the naked eye, and his danger again “creeps out” to the main pages of newspapers and Internet resources (see video).
But the West’s asteroid became more interesting after the Dawn probe as close to this celestial body and made a number snapshots of a few perplexed astronomers. For example, before the mission “Don” (Dawn), scientists believed that on this huge space block, the largest of the main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter (an asteroid has 576 kilometers in diameter) viewed a number of craters from collisions with other space objects. However, the pictures showed that the craters are connected here each other in an amazing way – according to the principle of “snowmen”, moreover, they happened, as the researchers now believe, far from colliding with meteorites, but from something else, while completely incomprehensible.
A photo from open sources
Moreover, on West, the Dawn probe also photographed no less mysterious long gutters encircling the asteroid at the equator. This is not observed on any other asteroid, but because scientists came to the conclusion that both the “craters” and these fantastic “channels” – artificial origin. Who and when built them, for which goals – no one knows.
Another mystery of Vesta was discovered: it turns out, an asteroid able to reflect up to 40 percent or more of sunlight, which is already surprisingly, its individual surfaces generally “burn” unnaturally bright and defiant, that’s why this “comic block” so clearly visible from Earth (see video below).
A photo from open sources
West from the very moment of its discovery by Heinrich Olbers (March 29 1807, named by Carl Gauss in honor of the ancient Roman goddess Vesta) was considered the brightest near-Earth asteroid. But before her research during the mission “Dawn” none of the scientists even could not have imagined that this space object is fraught with such many puzzles. Now researchers are analyzing the data, but they still can’t find answers to many questions …
