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Strange twin asteroids, the youngest ever seen, likely broke apart just 300 years ago

Writer's picture: STEM labsSTEM labs

Scientists have spotted two space rocks that may be Earth's freshest asteroid neighbors.


The strange pair of near-Earth asteroids is separated by about 600,000 miles (1 million kilometers), and researchers calculated that they likely broke off the same asteroid just a few centuries ago.


"It's very exciting to find such a young asteroid pair that was formed only about 300 years ago, which was like this morning — not even yesterday — in astronomical timescales," Petr Fatka, lead author on the new research and an astronomer at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, said in a statement published by Lowell Observatory in Arizona, where some of the observations used in the work were gathered.

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