Last week, astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth. The WISE mission is to search for "dark" objects in space like brown dwarf stars, vast dust clouds, and Earth-approaching asteroids. WISE finds them by sensing their heat in the form of infrared light most other telescopes can't pick up."Our instrument is finding [dozens] of asteroids every day that were never detected before," says Ned Wright, principal investigator for WISE and a physicist at the University of California in Los Angeles. "WISE is very good at this kind of work."
Most of the asteroids WISE is finding are in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but a fraction of them are different—they're the kind of Earth-approaching asteroids that keep the likes of Stephen Hawking awake at night.
Last week, astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth. The WISE mission is to search for "dark" objects in space like brown dwarf...
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