How a speck of light becomes an asteroid
June 30, 2017
In this sequence of four images taken during one night of observation by the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, the speck of light that moves relative to the background stars is a small asteroid that was, at the time, about as far …more
On the first day of the year 1801, Italian astronomer Gioacchino Giuseppe Maria Ubaldo Nicolò Piazzi found a previously uncharted "tiny star" near the constellation of Taurus. The following night Piazzi again observed this newfound celestial object, discovering that the speck had changed its position relative to the nearby stars. Piazzi knew that real stars were so far away that they never wandered—that they always appeared in the sky as fixed in location relative to each other. Due to the movement of this new object, the astronomer to the king of the two Sicilies suspected he had discovered something much closer—something within our solar system. Piazzi made history's first asteroid discovery. He named it after the Roman goddess for agriculture: Ceres.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-speck-asteroid.html#jCp
