Vesta: look up to spot the brightest asteroid, though it may take ‘a search and some patience’
- It will reach ‘opposition’ – lined up with sun and Earth – on Tuesday, when it will be visible without aid in dark rural areas, according to astronomer
- But he says that even then the asteroid will be faint and skywatchers will need to first locate brighter objects nearby such as Saturn to find it
Stargazers will have the chance to spot the solar system’s brightest asteroid, Vesta, in the next couple of weeks – even with the naked eye.
Observable from Tuesday, Vesta will loom from the southeastern sky after sunset and climb to its highest point in the southern sky around midnight, which is the best time for viewing.
This is when, as it lines up with the sun and the Earth with Earth in the middle, Vesta will reach a position known as “opposition”. That means it will be closest to the Earth and will reach its brightest – a visual magnitude of 5.6 – making it visible without any aid in dark rural areas, according to Xu Wen from the Tianjin Astronomical Society.
“Theoretically it will be visible the entire night, but observers in cities will probably need binoculars or a small telescope [to see it],” Xu told state news agency Xinhua on Monday.
At 530km (330 miles) wide, Vesta is the second largest asteroid in the solar system and dwells in a doughnut-shaped region called the main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
It was discovered two centuries ago and astronomers have since detected more than a million asteroids in that main belt. These space rocks are left over from the early days of the solar system – they failed to form planets – and range in size from tiny pebbles to large mountains.
Zhu Jin, an astronomer and former curator at the Beijing Planetarium, noted that asteroids are much smaller and dimmer than planets – and most of the time they can only be seen with large, professional telescopes.