Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2022

15 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING Institute in Mountain View, USA and at the Laboratoire d’Astro- physique de Marseille, France, who led a study on the asteroid pub- lished in Astronomy & Astrophy- sics . “Science makes a lot of pro- gress thanks to the study of weird outliers. I think Kleopatra is one of those and understanding this com- T his image provides a size comparison of the asteroid Kleopa- tra with northern Italy. The top half of the image shows a computer model of Kleopatra, a “dog-bone” shaped asteroid which orbits the Sun in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. End to end, Kleopatra is 270 kilometres long. The bottom half of the image gives an aerial view of northern Italy, with the footprint Kleopatra would have if it were hovering above it. [ESO/M. Kornmesser/Marchis et al.] plex, multiple asteroid system can help us learn more about our Solar System.” Kleopatra orbits the Sun in the As- teroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers have called it a “dog-bone asteroid” ever since radar observations around 20 years ago revealed it has two lobes connected