Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2018

49 JULY-AUGUST 2018 SPACE CHRONICLES Neptune — should contain a small fraction of rocky bodies from the inner Solar System, such as carbon- rich asteroids, referred to as car- bonaceous asteroids. Now, a recent paper has presented evidence for the first reliably-ob- served carbonaceous asteroid in the Kuiper Belt, providing strong sup- port for these theoretical models of our Solar System’s troubled youth. After painstaking measurements from multiple instruments at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), a small team of astronomers led by Tom Seccull of Queen’s University Belfast in the UK was able to measure the composition of the anomalous Kuiper Belt Object 2004 EW 95 , and thus determine that it is a carbona- ceous asteroid. This suggests that it originally formed in the inner Solar System and must have since mi- grated outwards. Other inner Solar System objects have previously been detected in the outer reaches of the Solar System, but this is the first car- bonaceous asteroid to be found far from home in the Kuiper Belt. The peculiar nature of 2004 EW 95 first came to light during routine obser- vations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope by Wesley Fraser,