490 Veritas

490 Veritas is a carbonaceous Veritasian asteroid, which may have been involved in one of the more massive asteroid-asteroid collisions of the past 100 million years. It was discovered by German astronomer Max Wolf at Heidelberg Observatory on 3 September 1902.

490 Veritas

Discovery
Discovered by	Max Wolf
Discovery site	Heidelberg Obs.
Discovery date	3 September 1902
Designations
MPC designation	(490) Veritas
Pronunciation	/ˈvɛrɪtæs/[1]
Alternative designations	1902 JP
Minor planet category	main-belt · (outer) Veritas[2]
Adjectives	Veritasian[3]
Orbital characteristics[4]
Epoch 31 July 2016 (JD 2457600.5)
Uncertainty parameter 0
Observation arc	113.37 yr (41409 d)
Aphelion	3.4715 AU (519.33 Gm)
Perihelion	2.8719 AU (429.63 Gm)
Semi-major axis	3.1717 AU (474.48 Gm)
Eccentricity	0.094527
Orbital period (sidereal)	5.65 yr (2063.2 d)
Mean anomaly	31.094°
Mean motion	0° 10m 28.164s / day
Inclination	9.2809°
Longitude of ascending node	178.335°
Argument of perihelion	194.390°
Earth MOID	1.87147 AU (279.968 Gm)
Jupiter MOID	1.98443 AU (296.867 Gm)
TJupiter	3.175
Physical characteristics
Dimensions	110.96 ± 3.80 km[5] 115.55±5.5 km[4]
Mass	(5.99 ± 2.23) × 1018 kg[5]
Mean density	8.37 ± 3.23 g/cm3[5]
Synodic rotation period	7.930 h (0.3304 d)
Geometric albedo	0.0622±0.006
Absolute magnitude (H)	8.53,[6] 8.32[4]

Description

With a diameter of more than 100 kilometers, Veritas is the largest member and namesake of the Veritas family, a mid-sized asteroid family of carbonaceous asteroids in the outer main-belt, that formed recently approximately 8.5±0.5 million years ago.^{[2][7]: 8, 23} David Nesvorný of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder traced the orbits of these bodies back in time, and calculated that they formed in a collision of a body at least 150 km in diameter with a smaller asteroid. Veritas and Undina would have been the largest fragments of that collision which caused a "late Miocene dust shower". The family consists of more than a thousand known members including 1086 Nata, 2428 Kamenyar and 2934 Aristophanes.

Late Miocene dust shower

Substantiating Nesvorný's estimate, Kenneth Farley et al. found evidence in sea-floor sediments of a fourfold increase in the amount of cosmic dust reaching Earth's surface, which began 8.2 million years ago and tapered off over the next million and a half years. This is one of the largest increases in dust deposits of the past 100 million years.^[8]

The suspected Veritas collision would have been too far from Jupiter for the fragments to have been slung into a collision course with Earth. However, solar radiation would have caused the resulting dust to drift inward to Earth orbit over a time span consistent with the record of dust in the ocean sediment.

Today continuing collisions among Veritas-family asteroids are estimated to send five thousand tons of cosmic dust to Earth each year, 15% of the total.

Study

490 Veritas has been observed to occult 13 stars between 2006 and 2023.