Astronomers say yes found an asteroid that spins faster than other space rocks of its size.
The asteroid, known as 2025 MN45, has a diameter of almost 710 meters and completes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes, based on an analysis of data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. “This is now the fastest-spinning asteroid larger than 500 meters that we know of,” University of Washington astronomer Sarah Greenstreet said today at the University of Washington. Winter Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix.
Greenstreet, who serves as an assistant astronomer at the National Science Foundation NOIRLab and leads the Rubin Observatory Working Group on Near-Earth and Interstellar Objects, is the lead author of an article in The Astrophysical Journal Letters describing the discovery and its implications. It is the first peer-reviewed paper based on data from Rubin’s LSST camera in Chile.
2025 MN45 is one of more than 2,100 solar system objects detected during the observatory’s commissioning phase. Over time, the LSST camera tracked variations in the light reflected from these objects. Greenstreet and her colleagues analyzed those variations to determine the size, distance, composition and rotation speed of 76 asteroids, all but one of which are in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. (The other asteroid is an object near Earth.)
The team discovered 16 “super-fast rotators” that spun at speeds ranging from 13 minutes to 2.2 hours per revolution – plus three “ultra-fast rotators,” including the 2025 MN45, that make a full revolution in less than five minutes.
Greenstreet said 2025 MN45 appears to be made of solid rock, unlike the “mess” material most asteroids are thought to be made of.
“We also believe it is likely a collision fragment of a much larger parent body that, early in the solar system’s history, was heated enough that its internal material melted and differentiated,” Greenstreet said. She and her colleagues suggest that the original collision blasted 2025 MN45 out of the dense core of its parent body and into space.
Astronomers have previously detected rapidly spinning asteroids less than 500 meters wide, but this is the first time larger objects have been found with rotation speeds greater than five minutes per revolution. The Rubin team’s other two ultra-fast rotators have speeds of 1.9 minutes and 3.8 minutes.
What would it be like to put a spin on 2025 MN45? Imagine riding on a Ferris wheel, like the Seattle Great Wheel, which is normally like that three revolutions in 10 to 12 minutes. Now make the wheel more than 10 times bigger and make sure the rotation speed is at least twice as fast. It feels like you’re driving more than 60 km/hour.
“If you were on it, it would probably be quite a ride to walk around the outside edge of this thing that’s the size of eight football fields,” Greenstreet said.
But the significance of the research goes beyond imagining an alien carnival ride.
“This is just the beginning of science for the Rubin Observatory,” Greenstreet said. “We’re already seeing that we can study smaller asteroids at greater distances than we’ve ever been able to study before. And because we can further study these fast rotators, we’re going to learn a lot of really crucial information about the internal strength, composition and collision history of these primitive Solar System bodies, which date back to the time the Solar System was formed.”
The study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, “Light curves, rotation periods, and colors for Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s first asteroid discoveries,” lists 71 co-authors. University of Washington authors include Greenstreet and Zhuofu (Chester) Li, Dmitrii E. Vavilov, Devanshi Singh, Mario Jurić, Željko Ivezić, Joachim Moeyens, Eric C. Bellm, Jacob A. Kurlander, Maria T. Patterson, Nima Sedaghat, Krzysztof Suberlak, and Ian S. Sullivan.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The University of Washington was a founding member of the consortium behind the project, which benefited from early contributions from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and software executive Charles Simonyi. The observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope was named in honor of Simonyi’s family.
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