A Utah husband-and-wife team may be the first to have sighted a particular alien world. True, the asteroid provisionally called J99V00S is a dim, small chunk of real estate, only two-thirds of a mile to 2 miles across. But it is an actual minor planet, coasting in the silent, icy depths of the solar system -- and discovering it is a great achievement for amateur astronomers.
They are Patrick Wiggins of Hansen Planetarium and Holly Phaneuf, who has a doctorate and is a college lecturer in astronomy. On the night of Nov. 2, they were using their home observatory to photograph a tiny part of the the asteroid belt, making CCD images and comparing views taken about 15 minutes apart.Their observatory is adjacent to a computer and study room. They can roll back the observatory's roof, aim their telescope, then go into the main section of the house and control their observing and photography from there.
The view from their 14-inch telescope shows up on their computer screen. As they make exposures with an electronic device called a CCD camera, the telescope drive tracks, ensuring that it remains pointed precisely at a target.
The Earth's rotation does not only cause the sun and moon to rise and set. Stars, planets, asteroids and nebulae seem to move just the same way the sun does. The telescope's tracker compensates for this motion in order to keep the image steady.
If the telescope is pointed at nothing but stars, two views taken some time apart will look identical. But if an asteroid is in the field, it will have moved on its own orbit between the exposures, showing up in different positions in the two photos.
Wiggins and Phaneuf were patrolling a section of the constellation Pisces, in the neighborhood of a known, relatively bright asteroid. As expected, when they examined the images, that asteroid had moved between the exposures. But another object also showed up in slightly different positions in the two views.
They notified the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, based in Cambridge, Mass., and got the disappointing news that the second asteroid was known also.
When a report is filed, the IAU quickly searches through its huge data base and examines the coordinates for any known object. As it happened, the IAU rapidly determined that the second asteroid was known. It was discovered a few weeks earlier, so recently that it was not in the data base that Wiggins and Phaneuf consulted.
But looking at the images, Phaneuf also had noticed a third object had moved, a tiny point on the upper right corner of the view.
"I thought he was looking at this one, and I said, 'Oh, yeah, look at that,' " she said. But Wiggins had been studying the brighter second object, the one that turned out to have been discovered.
"And he said, 'Oh, I didn't see that.' "
They were doubtful that the third point of light would prove to be something new.
"A number of times before, we found suspicious items and turned them in, and it turned out to be something that just wasn't in the records yet," Wiggins said.
This time, the IAU sent back a report that apparently nobody ever had reported the object until then.
"Perhaps it's so faint -- you know, it's about 18th magnitude -- nobody's seen it," Wiggins said.
Eighteenth magnitude is unbelievably dim. Magnitude numbers are ratings of brightness. The smaller the number the brighter the object. The brightest star is rated at -1. The faintest star visible without a telescope or binoculars is sixth magnitude.
A -1 star is just under 40 million times as bright as one of 18th magnitude.
That doesn't mean the asteroid was difficult to photograph since Wiggins and Phaneuf had the right gear. "With a computer and a CCD camera and a good telescope that tracks, it's surprisingly easy to find asteroids, simply because there's so many of them," she said.
"The difficult thing is to find an asteroid that nobody else has found before."
The couple designated their find UOFU03, meaning it was the third possibility to be reported by their site. Earlier, their home observatory was registered by the IAU as the Hansen Planetarium's University of Utah Observatory Number 718.
When the IAU responded, it listed a new designation for the find, using both their number and the new provisional name of J99V00S.
"The first time we tried this, it was 'No, it was something that had been discovered recently,' " Wiggins said.
"So this time I was being very circumspect. I was like, 'OK, I don't want to get my hopes up.' But of course I had."
When they got the notice from the IAU, it came in the form of just the two numbers and a symbol. He felt the symbol meant that it was a find, but he still had the feeling that they'd never discover anything.
"I didn't believe it when I first heard about it," Phaneuf agreed. "I thought, well, somebody else has probably found this just a week before, and it just hasn't got in the database yet.' "
Wiggins hopped on the Internet and visited the IAU site, looked up a list of symbols, and confirmed that it did indeed indicate this was an unknown object.
Immediately a problem arose.
"They don't really catalog it unless you get it two nights in a row, or at least two nights close together," he said. "The second night it was cloudy."
He realized clouds would get in the way of their confirmatory observations. So Wiggins issued a request on the Internet for others who are interested in the asteroid search to take a look at the particular region, and within an hour he got a response from a man in the Czech Republic.
The European "had got my message, gone out, used his observatory, got an image of it, sent me the image," he said. The second night of observation was done. The asteroid had indeed changed position, traveling further along its orbit.
Predicted points of its orbit now are posted on the Internet, and other observers are welcome to take a look, checking to tie down the exact orbit.
"Every bit of data that gets put in there makes the orbit that better-defined. And hopefully after another year or so we'll find that in fact it is an original discovery," he said.
The possibility exists that once the orbit is thoroughly mapped, it will turn out to be an asteroid observed and recorded earlier, but then lost. However, since it is so dim it seems unlikely to have been discovered, a feeling that is reinforced by the fact that the IAU's gigantic data base does not show this as any known object.
It is about as far from Earth as the sun is, but it's in the direction of Jupiter. The orbital period is about 41 years.
The size may be between half a mile and two miles, although that is uncertain.
"That's based on its brightness and distance," Wiggins said. If the object is intrinsically dark it won't reflect much light and could be bigger than it seems; conversely, if it's made of some especially bright substance, like ice, it may be smaller.
Wiggins and Phaneuf began their asteroid search about a year ago, using a sensitive CCD camera. The chip allows them to register extremely dim features in relatively short exposures, in this case, about two minutes.
"Dr. Holly is definitely a partner in crime here," Wiggins said. "Actually, she's the one that got me into this.
"For years and years I only did film and wouldn't do CCD (for astronomical photos), and so she suggested that maybe we should try this."
It was her fascination with the latest equipment that drew her to CCDs, she said. But both are delighted that using such devices lets amateurs make real contributions to science.
Phaneuf also is intrigued by the idea that theirs may be a dark asteroid covered with carbon material.
"I'm interested in carbon-containing items in outer space because my background is in organic chemistry," she said.
"We know that on Earth all life is carbon-based. It's difficult to conceive of life not being carbon-based. But there's really a lot of organic material in outer space."
About 40,000 tons of space debris rains down on Earth every year, most of it in the form of dust, she said. Much of that is organic.
"Meteorites and asteroids contain carbon," she said. "I find it really interesting."
Determining whether this is actually new or something found 15 years ago could prove to be a long, tedious effort, Wiggins said. But once the asteroid's orbit is well-established and it is shown to be different from any other known space object, Wiggins and Phaneuf will be allowed to name it.
Meanwhile, they'll continue to prowl the heavens looking for new discoveries.
"It becomes addictive, like gambling, because it's so easy to find them," she said, "and you keep hoping that you'll find one that nobody else has found before."
Wiggins and Phaneuf did not have to hope for long that they'd find another. Shortly after this interview was completed, they received notice from the IAU that another target they had located seems to be a previously undiscovered asteroid.