395E-436-Lonely Asteroids

Most asteroids are located in the lonely space between Mars and Jupiter where the average distance between two asteroids is about 600,000 miles. Even though there is a tremendous space between asteroids they occasionally collide and pieces of them become Earth approaching objects. Most of them remain close to the plane of the solar system, however, a few are sent on paths which take them into the extremely lonely space high above and far below the orbits of the planets about the Sun. In 2017, my team, the Catalina Sky Survey, discovered 13 of these loneliest asteroids whose paths are tilted more than 45 degrees to the plane of the solar system. They have an average diameter about 4 times larger than that of the 987 asteroids we discovered in 2017. Even though 13 is a small sample it is interesting to speculate what this size difference could mean. In 2013, astronomers used the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to discover that main belt asteroids with orbits which are highly inclined to the plane of the solar system tend to be larger and made of stronger materials than those asteroids which reside in the plane of the solar system. They attribute these differences to the collisions which must have occurred to send asteroids into highly inclined orbits about the Sun. If this result applies to the lonely near Earth asteroids we discovered then perhaps they are made of very strong materials and could be of particular interest to asteroid miners.