Asteroid with three moons of its own found for the first time

We are generally comfortable with the idea of planets revolving around stars or satellites of individual planets. But many of us are yet to wrap our heads around an asteroid having its own moons.

But one of the millions of asteroids in our solar system has now got the recognition of being an asteroid with three very own satellites. The asteroid is named 130 Elektra or just Elektra.

"Elektra is the first quadruple system ever detected," wrote a team of astronomers led by Anthony Berdeu of the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand in their paper.

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"This new detection … shows that dedicated data reduction and processing algorithms modeling the physics of the instruments can push their contrast limits further."

Asteroid Elektra is 260 kilometers (160 miles) across. It was first discovered in 1873. However, its first moon named S/2003 (130) 1 was discovered 130 years later. Its second moon S/2014 (130) 1 was discovered in 2014. Discovery of the third moon has made this an interesting system.

Discovering asteroids is a tough task to start with. Asteroids are much much smaller than planets and are dimly illuminated by sunlight. Satellites of asteroids (if any) are harder to detect still as they may appear very tiny specks of light, often outshone by their parent asteroid.