Over 350 asteroids have hidden moons, Gaia space telescope finds

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia space telescope has already proven itself invaluable in tracking billions of stars in the Milky Way, but now it has proved its worth with much smaller bodies, much closer to home.

The Gaia mission has spotted potential moons orbiting over 350 asteroids that were previously predicted to be singletons. Gaia had already been investigating known asteroid binaries, confirming they have companions, but this breakthrough shows the star surveyor is capable of conducting "blind searches" for completely new asteroid-moon partnerships.

If the new observations are confirmed, these 352 binaries will almost double the number of known binary asteroid systems in the solar system.

"Binary asteroids are difficult to find as they are mostly so small and far away from us," Luana Liberato, leader of the team behind the discovery and researcher at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, said in a statement. "Despite us expecting just under one-sixth of asteroids to have a companion, so far, we have only found 500 of the one billion known asteroids to be in binary systems.

"But this discovery shows that there are many asteroid moons out there just waiting to be found."

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Asteroids are the remains of the material that first formed the sun and then birthed the planets of the solar system over 4.6 billion years ago. They are mainly located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, thus receiving little radiation from the sun, which means this early solar system material is mostly "unspoiled" in asteroids.