The near-Earth asteroid responsible for the spectacular annual Geminids meteor shower has been caught doing something really unexpected.
Phaethon's unusual characteristics have made it the target of a future lander mission,, spearheaded by the Japanese Space Agency. So scientists have been working on learning more about the strange rock, to better plan how to rendezvous with it.
Phaethon's brightness changes as it rotates, which means that we have been able to characterize its rotational period over time, narrowing it down to 3.6 hours. But we need precise data if we're going to land a probe on this thing, so planetary scientist Sean Marshall of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was working to refine Phaethon's size, shape, and rotation when he noticed something screwy.
A closer look at the full dataset, spanning the period from 1989 to 2021, revealed that the change could be explained by a gradual, constant acceleration, losing 4 milliseconds of the rotation period a year. Year-on-year, the change doesn't make a lot of difference, but as the decades rack up, it's become much more prominent., when they noticed that their data was out of sync with 1989 data. At the time, the researchers didn't have quite enough information to explain the difference.
This makes Phaethon one of just 11 asteroids with accelerating rotations, out of the thousands of asteroids whose rotations have been characterized. It's possible that this is the result of mass loss;
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