Space

The asteroid Dinkinesh’s newfound moon is actually a contact binary – two objects lightly touching at their ends. This is the first time such a binary has been found orbiting another asteroid.

Dinkinesh was the first rock visited by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, which flew past on 1 November. When the spacecraft went by, it found a smaller rock orbiting Dinkinesh that the Lucy team has provisionally named Salam.

But as Lucy has sent more data back to Earth, it’s become clear that Salam isn’t just a single object. Instead, it appears to be two similar-sized rocks connected at the end, resulting in a sort of peanut shape. The team missed it at first because in the images from Lucy, one lobe of the asteroid must have been hidden behind the other.