Introduction The Centaur (2060) Chiron was discovered in 1977 (Gehrels et al. 1977; Kowal 1979). Its orbital semimajor axis ranges from approximately 8.5 to 19 au, with an eccentricity of 0.38 and ...

Chiron belongs to the class of objects that astronomers call "Centaurs." Centaurs are space objects that orbit the sun between Jupiter and Neptune.

In 1977, Chiron became the first centaur ever discovered. Astronomers originally thought that it was an asteroid, but when it was seen emitting a halo of gas and a tail like a comet, ...

Chiron, not to be confused with Pluto’s moon Charon, was discovered in 1977 and named after the “wisest and justest” of the ...

The strange rock mass, first spotted in 1977, has been identified as 2060 Chiron and is classified as a centaur — named for the mythological hybrid half-man, half-horse — and orbits the sun ...

Minor planet 2060 Chiron is what's known as a Centaur, which are captured cometary objects that travel around the sun on looping orbits between Jupiter and Neptune. Chiron is just 218 kilometers ...

The Education of Achilles, by Bénigne Gagneraux (1785). Source: Bénigne Gagneraux on Wikimedia Commons/public domain In the Iliad, Homer calls Chiron the "wisest and justest of all the centaurs ...

Unveiling the ice and gas nature of active centaur (2060) Chiron using the James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomy & Astrophysics , 2024; 692: L11 DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202450124 Cite This Page : ...

What is causing the structure of the dust to evolve, and where exactly the dust comes from, is still a mystery.

UCF researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to reveal one-of-a-kind attributes of (2060) Chiron, a distant “centaur” in space sharing properties of both a comet and an asteroid, giving ...