geminiann08022 — Announcement
A Highly-split Kuiper Belt Pair
28 October 2008: A group of astronomers using a battery of 8-meter telescopes, including both Gemini North and South, have discovered a small pair of gravitationally bound Kuiper Belt objects with an enormous separation (Figure 1). The extreme binary, 2001 QW322, orbits at 43 astronomical units or about 6.5billion kilometers from the Sun. The two bodies are separated by about 125,000 kilometers (one third the distance from the Earth to the Moon) which is very large for these two tiny bodies. As a comparison, this is approximately equivalent to a pair of baseballs gravitationally "connected" and orbiting each other at a distance of 200 kilometers! 2001 QW322 was discovered in August 2001 with the Canada-France-Hawai‘i Telescope. Since then, (from 2002-2007), the pair has been monitored closely using 8-meter-class telescopes (Gemini North,Gemini South and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope) to obtain high precision photometric observations of the faint double system (mg = …