Cosmic Queries – Asteroid Hunters with Marina Brozovic
StarTalk Radio
00:00
The Origin of the Word Asteroids
Herschel, who first named them, saw that there were these dots of light moving across the sky. He described them as star-like, asteroid, Latin for star, is like. So, they're nothing like stars, but to an optical telescope, it's just a star that's moving. That's the origin of the word asteroid. With radar, we are observing near-Earth asteroids - about at least several hundred meters in size. We can see something that is six feet in size. It is that level of detail.
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