Did I just see that "asteroid" firing thrusters...
Astroboffins dig into the weird backwards orbit of the Bee-Zed asteroid
Asteroid 2015 BZ509 – also known as Bee-Zed – is the only asteroid in our solar system with a confirmed retrograde orbit lasting 12 years; the same orbital period as Jupiter. The discovery was published in Nature in March by a team of physicists led by Paul Wiegert, a researcher at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 29th June 2017 09:19 GMT DropBear
Most of the pictures and videos I've seen about BZ's orbit show a somewhat pretzel-like curve, but that's only when "viewed from Jupiter", ie. the "pretzel" follows / is locked to Jupiter as Jupiter orbits the sun. I suppose the astro-boffins doing the PR work found that shape more "interesting" than the Sun-relative orbit - apparently looking like a plain old, boring ellipse (which I personally find much more remarkable). Sadly, figuring out what the actual shape of the orbit is and whether it is a true ellipse - considering it is the result of "crossing paths" with Jupiter twice each time it goes around the Sun - is way beyond my math/astro-fu, but at any rate it closely resembles one...
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Thursday 29th June 2017 11:56 GMT I ain't Spartacus
but their motion is locked and they never come within 176 million kilometers (109 million miles) of each other
Obviously either Jupiter or BZ have a restraining order.
This information is easily available at your local planning office, at Barnards Star. Even if it is locked in a filing cabinet, in a disused toilet with a sign on the door saying, 'beware of the leopard'.
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Friday 30th June 2017 12:03 GMT Faux Science Slayer
All stars begin as binary systems.....Ceres-Vesta....Hellas Planitia
Mars has 635,000 impact craters, six over 400 km wide, and Hellas Planitia, which is
2,300 km wide and 9 km deep, suggesting impact with a brown dwarf sized body,
approximately 20% of the size of the Sun. The Planet X hypothesis solves a number of
anomalies, Moons mass/orbit/origin, the 'fifth rocky planet' astroid belt and more.