490_Veritas

490 Veritas

490 Veritas

Main-belt asteroid

Veritas, minor planet designation 490 Veritas, is a carbonaceous Veritasian asteroid, which may have been involved in one of the more massive asteroid-asteroid collisions of the past 100 million years. It was discovered by German astronomer Max Wolf at Heidelberg Observatory on 3 September 1902.

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Description

With an diameter of more than 100 kilometers, Veritas is the largest member and namesake of the Veritas family, a mid-sized asteroid family of carbonaceous asteroids in the outer main-belt, that formed recently approximately 8.5±0.5 million years ago.[2][7]: 8, 23  David Nesvorný of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder traced the orbits of these bodies back in time, and calculated that they formed in a collision of a body at least 150 km in diameter with a smaller asteroid. Veritas and Undina would have been the largest fragments of that collision which caused a "late Miocene dust shower". The family consists of more than a thousand known members including 1086 Nata, 2428 Kamenyar and 2934 Aristophanes.

Late Miocene dust shower

Substantiating Nesvorný's estimate, Kenneth Farley et al. found evidence in sea-floor sediments of a fourfold increase in the amount of cosmic dust reaching Earth's surface, which began 8.2 million years ago and tapered off over the next million and a half years. This is one of the largest increases in dust deposits of the past 100 million years.[8]

The suspected Veritas collision would have been too far from Jupiter for the fragments to have been slung into a collision course with Earth. However, solar radiation would have caused the resulting dust to drift inward to Earth orbit over a time span consistent with the record of dust in the ocean sediment.

Today continuing collisions among Veritas-family asteroids are estimated to send five thousand tons of cosmic dust to Earth each year, 15% of the total.

Study

490 Veritas has been observed to occult 13 stars between 2006 and 2023.

References

  1. [1]
    Noah Webster (1884) A Practical Dictionary of the English Language
  2. [2]
    "Asteroid 490 Veritas – Nesvorny HCM Asteroid Families V3.0". Small Bodies Data Ferret. Retrieved 24 October 2019.
  3. [3]
    James Morrow (1990) City of Truth
  4. [4]
    Yeomans, Donald K., "490 Veritas", JPL Small-Body Database Browser, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, retrieved 9 May 2016.
  5. [5]
    Carry, B. (December 2012), "Density of asteroids", Planetary and Space Science, 73 (1): 98–118, arXiv:1203.4336, Bibcode:2012P&SS...73...98C, doi:10.1016/j.pss.2012.03.009. See Table 1.
  6. [6]
    Warner, Brian D. (December 2007), "Initial Results of a Dedicated H-G Project", The Minor Planet Bulletin, 34 (4): 113–119, Bibcode:2007MPBu...34..113W.
  7. [7]
    Nesvorný, D.; Broz, M.; Carruba, V. (December 2014). "Identification and Dynamical Properties of Asteroid Families". Asteroids IV. pp. 297–321. arXiv:1502.01628. Bibcode:2015aste.book..297N. doi:10.2458/azu_uapress_9780816532131-ch016. ISBN 9780816532131.
  8. [8]
    Farley, Kenneth A.; Vokrouhlický, David; Bottke, William F.; Nesvorný, David (January 2006). "A late Miocene dust shower from the break-up of an asteroid in the main belt" (PDF). Nature. 439 (7074): 295–297. Bibcode:2006Natur.439..295F. doi:10.1038/nature04391. PMID 16421563. Retrieved 4 September 2017.
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