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490 Veritas is a carbonaceous Veritasian asteroid, which may have been involved in one of the more massive asteroid-asteroid collisions of the past 100 million years. It was discovered by German astronomer Max Wolf at Heidelberg Observatory on 3 September 1902.

Description

With an diameter of more than 100 kilometers, Veritas is the largest member and namesake of the Veritas family, a mid-sized asteroid family of carbonaceous asteroids in the outer main-belt, that formed recently approximately 8.5±0.5 million years ago. David Nesvorný of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder traced the orbits of these bodies back in time, and calculated that they formed in a collision of a body at least 150 km in diameter with a smaller asteroid. Veritas and Undina would have been the largest fragments of that collision which caused a "late Miocene dust shower". The family consists of more than a thousand known members including 1086 Nata, 2428 Kamenyar and 2934 Aristophanes.

Late Miocene dust shower

Substantiating Nesvorný's estimate, Kenneth Farley et al. found evidence in sea-floor sediments of a fourfold increase in the amount of cosmic dust reaching Earth's surface, which began 8.2 million years ago and tapered off over the next million and a half years. This is one of the largest increases in dust deposits of the past 100 million years.

The suspected Veritas collision would have been too far from Jupiter for the fragments to have been slung into a collision course with Earth. However, solar radiation would have caused the resulting dust to drift inward to Earth orbit over a time span consistent with the record of dust in the ocean sediment.

Today continuing collisions among Veritas-family asteroids are estimated to send five thousand tons of cosmic dust to Earth each year, 15% of the total.

Study

490 Veritas has been observed to occult 13 stars between 2006 and 2023.

References

1. Noah Webster (1884) A Practical Dictionary of the English Language
2. ^ "Asteroid 490 Veritas – Nesvorny HCM Asteroid Families V3.0". Small Bodies Data Ferret. Retrieved 24 October 2019.
3. James Morrow (1990) City of Truth
4. ^ Yeomans, Donald K., "490 Veritas", JPL Small-Body Database Browser, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, retrieved 9 May 2016.
5. ^ Carry, B. (December 2012), "Density of asteroids", Planetary and Space Science, 73 (1): 98–118, arXiv:1203.4336, Bibcode:2012P&SS...73...98C, doi:10.1016/j.pss.2012.03.009. See Table 1.
6. Warner, Brian D. (December 2007), "Initial Results of a Dedicated H-G Project", The Minor Planet Bulletin, 34 (4): 113–119, Bibcode:2007MPBu...34..113W.
7. Nesvorný, D.; Broz, M.; Carruba, V. (December 2014). "Identification and Dynamical Properties of Asteroid Families". Asteroids IV. pp. 297–321. arXiv:1502.01628. Bibcode:2015aste.book..297N. doi:10.2458/azu_uapress_9780816532131-ch016. ISBN 9780816532131.
8. Farley, Kenneth A.; Vokrouhlický, David; Bottke, William F.; Nesvorný, David (January 2006). "A late Miocene dust shower from the break-up of an asteroid in the main belt" (PDF). Nature. 439 (7074): 295–297. Bibcode:2006Natur.439..295F. doi:10.1038/nature04391. PMID 16421563. Retrieved 4 September 2017.

External links

• The Asteroid Veritas: An intruder in a family named after it?
• Lightcurve plot of (490) Veritas Archived 14 March 2022 at the Wayback Machine, Antelope Hills Observatory
• "Asteroid Smashup Yields Dust Shower on Earth" from SkyandTelescope.com, Jan. 20, 2006.
• 490 Veritas at AstDyS-2, Asteroids—Dynamic Site
  • Ephemeris · Observation prediction · Orbital info · Proper elements · Observational info
• 490 Veritas at the JPL Small-Body Database
  • Close approach · Discovery · Ephemeris · Orbit viewer · Orbit parameters · Physical parameters

• Minor planet object articles (numbered)
• Veritas asteroids
• Discoveries by Max Wolf
• Named minor planets
• C-type asteroids (Tholen)
• Ch-type asteroids (SMASS)
• Astronomical objects discovered in 1902