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Elektra and its three moons. (ESO/Berdeu et al., Yang et al.) ====================================================================================== An asteroid discovered in the 19th century has just been identified as the most crowded we've ever found. It's called 130 Elektra, or just Elektra for short, and astronomers have just discovered that it has not one, nor two, but three smaller satellite companions, or moons. That not only makes it the most numerous asteroid system known to date, but demonstrates how we might find other faint, hard-to-see asteroid moons in the future. "Elektra is the first quadruple system ever detected," wrote a team of astronomers led by...

Elektra was first discovered in 1873, orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Oblong-shaped and 160 miles across on its longest side, it is a relatively large asteroid and completes an orbit of the sun every five years. In 2003, the first moon was discovered orbiting Elektra, and in 2014 a second. The discoveries were interesting, but not unusual — more than 150 asteroids are known to have one or two moons, in the same way planets can have moons that are gravitationally bound to them. “Multiple moons can be found around large asteroids,” said Bin Yang, an...

"The fact that he's dead is unfortunate but looking back on his life it's a very pleasant thought."The father of late The Doors singer Jim Morrison has branded the death of his estranged son "unfortunate," despite the rocker often singing about his family's imagined demise. George Morrison, a retired Navy admiral, insists memories of his rocker son are "pleasant" - even though he once joked his parents were dead and used Oedipal rant "The End" to imagine killing his dad and sleeping with his mother. However, in a new memoir of the band, George remains positive about his child. Contributing...

ARAD'S MEGA MARVEL MOVIE, TV UPDATE Marvel Enterprises today held their inaugural Analyst Day Webcast during which Marvel Studios CEO Avi Arad delivered his previously promised updates on Marvel's upcoming slate of movie and television projects. Arad began his segment of the proceedings by crediting Marvel's recent movie successes to a new generation of filmmakers who grew up reading Marvel Comics. "There is a whole generation of people that grew up on sci-fi {and} comic books, specifically Marvel," he said. "These people earned their stripes over the years, professionally, to get to the point that they can take their favorite...