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Astronomers Spot Two Unusually Red Objects in the Asteroid Belt - Gizmodo
Jul 30, 2021 56 secs
They’re red, they’re reasonably big, and they have no business being in the main asteroid belt, but their discovery confirms the complex conditions in place when the solar system was still forming.

Named 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, the asteroids have a redder spectral signature than any other asteroid in the main belt, that highly populated band of asteroids situated between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroids 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia “are thought to have been formed near the outer edge of the Solar System beyond the distant organic snow line and then moved to the asteroid belt during the early epoch of the Solar System’s formation,” notes a JAXA press release.

This finding suggests some asteroids in the main belt formed in the outer solar system, and that a population of these objects is likely to exist within the main belt.

Instead of traveling to the outer edge of the solar system for samples of Kuiper Belt objects, all we’d have to do is send a probe to the asteroid belt, where it could study both inner object asteroids and those that formed far, far away.

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