4 Vesta

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This article is about the asteroid. For the Roman goddess, see Vesta (mythology). For other uses, see Vesta (disambiguation).

4 Vesta
Synodic rotation period
0.2226 d (5.342 h)[6][13]
Equatorial rotation velocity
93.1 m/s[c]
29°
North pole right ascension
20h 32m[d]
North pole declination
48°[d]
0.423[15]
Temperaturemin: 75 K (−198 °C)
max: 250 K (−23 °C)[16]
V[6][17]
5.1[18] to 8.48
3.20[6][15]
0.70″ to 0.22″

Vesta (minor-planet designation: 4 Vesta) is one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, with a mean diameter of 525 kilometres (326 mi).[10] It was discovered by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers on 29 March 1807[6] and is named after Vesta, the virgin goddess of home and hearth from Roman mythology.[19]

Vesta is thought to be the second-largest asteroid, both by mass and by volume, after the dwarf planet Ceres.[20][21][22] Measurements give it a nominal volume only slightly larger than that of Pallas (about 5% greater), but it is 25% to 30% more massive. It constitutes an estimated 9% of the mass of the asteroid belt.[23] Vesta is the only known remaining rocky protoplanet (with a differentiated interior) of the kind that formed the terrestrial planets.[24][25][26] Numerous fragments of Vesta were ejected by collisions one and two billion years ago that left two enormous craters occupying much of Vesta's southern hemisphere.[27][28] Debris from these events has fallen to Earth as howardite–eucrite–diogenite (HED) meteorites, which have been a rich source of information about Vesta.[29][30][31]

Vesta is the

brightest asteroid visible from Earth. It is regularly as bright as magnitude 5.1,[18] at which times it is faintly visible to the naked eye. Its maximum distance from the Sun is slightly greater than the minimum distance of Ceres from the Sun,[e] although its orbit lies entirely within that of Ceres.[32]

NASA's Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta on 16 July 2011 for a one-year exploration and left the orbit of Vesta on 5 September 2012[33] en route to its final destination, Ceres. Researchers continue to examine data collected by Dawn for additional insights into the formation and history of Vesta.[34][35]

History

Discovery

Vesta, Ceres, and the Moon with sizes shown to scale

Heinrich Olbers discovered Pallas in 1802, the year after the discovery of Ceres. He proposed that the two objects were the remnants of a destroyed planet. He sent a letter with his proposal to the British astronomer William Herschel, suggesting that a search near the locations where the orbits of Ceres and Pallas intersected might reveal more fragments. These orbital intersections were located in the constellations of Cetus and Virgo.[36] Olbers commenced his search in 1802, and on 29 March 1807 he discovered Vesta in the constellation Virgo—a coincidence, because Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta are not fragments of a larger body. Because the asteroid Juno had been discovered in 1804, this made Vesta the fourth object to be identified in the region that is now known as the asteroid belt. The discovery was announced in a letter addressed to German astronomer Johann H. Schröter dated 31 March.[37] Because Olbers already had credit for discovering a planet (Pallas; at the time, the asteroids were considered to be planets), he gave the honor of naming his new discovery to German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose orbital calculations had enabled astronomers to confirm the existence of Ceres, the first asteroid, and who had computed the orbit of the new planet in the remarkably short time of 10 hours.[38][39] Gauss decided on the Roman virgin goddess of home and hearth, Vesta.[40]

Name and symbol

Vesta was the fourth asteroid to be discovered, hence the number 4 in its formal designation. The name Vesta, or national variants thereof, is in international use with two exceptions: Greece and China. In Greek, the name adopted was the Hellenic equivalent of Vesta, Hestia (4 Εστία); in English, that name is used for 46 Hestia (Greeks use the name "Hestia" for both, with the minor-planet numbers used for disambiguation). In Chinese, Vesta is called the 'hearth-god(dess) star', 灶神星 zàoshénxīng, naming the asteroid for Vesta's role, similar to the Chinese names of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.[f]

Upon its discovery, Vesta was, like Ceres, Pallas, and Juno before it, classified as a planet and given a planetary symbol. The symbol represented the altar of Vesta with its sacred fire and was designed by Gauss.[41][42] In Gauss's conception, now obsolete, this was drawn Gauss's version of the astronomical symbol for Vesta: his form is in the pipeline for Unicode 17.0 as U+1F777 🝷.[43][44][g] The asteroid symbols were gradually retired from astronomical use after 1852, but the symbols for the first four asteroids were resurrected for astrology in the 1970s. The abbreviated modern astrological variant of the Vesta symbol is Astrological version of the astronomical symbol for Vesta (U+26B6 ⚶).[43][h]

After the discovery of Vesta, no further objects were discovered for 38 years, and during this time the Solar System was thought to have eleven planets.[49] However, in 1845, new asteroids started being discovered at a rapid pace, and by 1851 there were fifteen, each with its own symbol, in addition to the eight major planets (Neptune had been discovered in 1846). It soon became clear that it would be impractical to continue inventing new planetary symbols indefinitely, and some of the existing ones proved difficult to draw quickly. That year, the problem was addressed by Benjamin Apthorp Gould, who suggested numbering asteroids in their order of discovery, and placing this number in a disk (circle) as the generic symbol of an asteroid. Thus, the fourth asteroid, Vesta, acquired the generic symbol ④. This was soon coupled with the name into an official number–name designation, ④ Vesta, as the number of minor planets increased. By 1858, the circle had been simplified to parentheses, (4) Vesta, which were easier to typeset. Other punctuation, such as 4) Vesta and 4, Vesta, was also used, but had more or less completely died out by 1949.[50]

Early measurements

SPHERE image is shown on the left, with a synthetic view derived from Dawn images shown on the right for comparison.[51]

Photometric observations of Vesta were made at the

Observatoire de Toulouse in 1909. These and other observations allowed the rotation rate of Vesta to be determined by the 1950s. However, the early estimates of the rotation rate came into question because the light curve included variations in both shape and albedo.[52]

Early estimates of the diameter of Vesta ranged from 383 kilometres (238 mi) in 1825, to 444 km (276 mi).

speckle interferometry was used to measure a dimension that varied between 498 and 548 km (309 and 341 mi) during the rotational period.[53] In 1991, an occultation of the star SAO 93228 by Vesta was observed from multiple locations in the eastern United States and Canada. Based on observations from 14 different sites, the best fit to the data was an elliptical profile with dimensions of about 550 km × 462 km (342 mi × 287 mi).[54] Dawn confirmed this measurement.[i] These measurements will help determine the thermal history, size of the core, role of water in asteroid evolution and what meteorites found on Earth come from these bodies, with the ultimate goal of understanding the conditions and processes present at the solar system's earliest epoch and the role of water content and size in planetary evolution.[55]

Vesta became the first asteroid to have its mass determined. Every 18 years, the asteroid

gravitational perturbations of Arete, Hans G. Hertz estimated the mass of Vesta at (1.20±0.08)×10−10 M☉ (solar masses).[56] More refined estimates followed, and in 2001 the perturbations of 17 Thetis were used to calculate the mass of Vesta to be (1.31±0.02)×10−10 M☉.[57]
Dawn determined it to be 1.3029×10−10 M☉.

Orbit

Vesta orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, within the asteroid belt, with a period of 3.6 Earth years,[6] specifically in the inner asteroid belt, interior to the Kirkwood gap at 2.50 AU. Its orbit is moderately inclined (i = 7.1°, compared to 7° for Mercury and 17° for Pluto) and moderately eccentric (e = 0.09, about the same as for Mars).[6]

True orbital resonances between asteroids are considered unlikely; due to their small masses relative to their large separations, such relationships should be very rare.[58] Nevertheless, Vesta is able to capture other asteroids into temporary 1:1 resonant orbital relationships (for periods up to 2 million years or more); about forty such objects have been identified.[59] Decameter-sized objects detected in the vicinity of Vesta by Dawn may be such quasi-satellites rather than proper satellites.[59]

Rotation

Olbers Regio (dark area) defines the prime meridian in the IAU coordinate system. It is shown here in a Hubble shot of Vesta, because it is not visible in the more detailed Dawn images.
Claudia crater (indicated by the arrow at the bottom of the closeup image at right) defines the prime meridian in the Dawn/NASA coordinate system.

Vesta's rotation is relatively fast for an asteroid (5.342 h) and

prograde, with the north pole pointing in the direction of right ascension 20 h 32 min, declination +48° (in the constellation Cygnus) with an uncertainty of about 10°. This gives an axial tilt of 29°.[60]

Coordinate systems

Two longitudinal coordinate systems are used for Vesta, with

IAU established a coordinate system in 1997 based on Hubble photos, with the prime meridian running through the center of Olbers Regio, a dark feature 200 km across. When Dawn arrived at Vesta, mission scientists found that the location of the pole assumed by the IAU was off by 10°, so that the IAU coordinate system drifted across the surface of Vesta at 0.06° per year, and also that Olbers Regio was not discernible from up close, and so was not adequate to define the prime meridian with the precision they needed. They corrected the pole, but also established a new prime meridian 4° from the center of Claudia, a sharply defined crater 700 meters across, which they say results in a more logical set of mapping quadrangles.[61] All NASA publications, including images and maps of Vesta, use the Claudian meridian, which is unacceptable to the IAU. The IAU Working Group on Cartographic Coordinates and Rotational Elements recommended a coordinate system, correcting the pole but rotating the Claudian longitude by 150° to coincide with Olbers Regio.[62] It was accepted by the IAU, although it disrupts the maps prepared by the Dawn team, which had been positioned so they would not bisect any major surface features.[61][63]

Physical characteristics

Relative sizes of the four largest asteroids. Vesta is second from left.