The Brightest Asteroid Vesta Will be Visible to Naked Eye till Mid July

There is a treat in the night sky for heavenly body lovers, they can look at the brightest asteroid in the solar system with their naked eyes. All they have to do is to get out into the open during the night time and gaze at the sky and enjoy the moment.

When and by whom Vesta was discovered?

Asteroid Vesta is 326 miles wide and it is located in the asteroid belt between planets Jupiter and Mars. Vesta was discovered by a German astronomer Heinrich Olbers in the year 1807. He had also discovered another asteroid named Pallas. He was the first person to discover two asteroids. In 1596, Johannes Kepler, an astronomer put forward a theory that a planet should exist in the empty space between Jupiter and Mars. A group called celestial police was formed in 1798 to search for this planet. In a letter to an astronomer friend, Olbers wrote, "Could it be that Ceres and Pallas are just a pair of fragments … of a once greater planet which at one time occupied its proper place between Mars and Jupiter?" Olbers sent his calculations to a well-known mathematician named Carl Friedrich Gauss. This great gentleman used his super brain to calculate the orbit of Pallas in only 10 hours. To honor this great feat, he was given the job of naming the new body. 4 Vesta was the name chosen by him which means, goddess of the hearth, and sister to Ceres. 4 refers to the fourth asteroid to be discovered

Features of Vesta

What distinguishes Vesta from other asteroids is that it has light and dark patches on its surface just like the Moon caused by the cooling of lava. A huge mountain lies over Vesta's southern pole. The height of the mountain is over 65,000 feet (20 kilometers). It is almost as tall as Mars’ Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system. Olympus Mons is the highest mountain in the solar system with a height of 24 kilometers. Scientists were lucky to have samples of Vesta as pieces of Vesta visited Earth in the form of meteorites. In 2011, NASA space probe called Dawn reached Vesta.

How to spot the brightest asteroid?

The easiest way to spot the asteroid is to follow Bob King’s instructions: planet Saturn offers an easy way to navigate the constellation’s star fields to the asteroid. Use the map to locate Saturn and then star-hop with the naked eye or binoculars to 3.8-magnitude Mu (μ) Sagittarii. The asteroid is located 2.5°–4° northwest of that star through mid-June. Despite its location in this star-rich region of the sky, Vesta has little competition from similarly bright stars, making it fairly easy to spot.

For those who haven’t seen an asteroid, now is the best time as the asteroid will not be this close to Earth till 2040. It will shine brighter than it has done in the past years.