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on Twitter Orbits of twin moonlets around 87 Sylvia. Image
credit: ESO Click to enlarge One of the thousands of minor
planets orbiting the Sun has been found to have its own mini
planetary system. Astronomer Franck Marchis (University of
California, Berkeley, USA) and his colleagues at the
Observatoire de Paris (France) have discovered the first triple
asteroid system – two small asteroids orbiting a larger one
known since 1866 as 87 Sylvia. “Since double asteroids seem to
be common, people have been looking for multiple asteroid
systems for a long time,” said Marchis. “I couldn’t believe we
found one.” The discovery was made with Yepun, one of ESO’s
8.2-m telescopes of the Very Large Telescope Array at Cerro
Paranal (Chile), using the outstanding image’ sharpness provided
by the adaptive optics NACO instrument. Via the observatory’s
proven “Service Observing Mode”, Marchis and his colleagues were
able to obtain sky images of many asteroids over