Ground telescopes show asteroid (44) Nysa may be a three-lobe contact body with a new moon

An international team led by Kate Minker at Lowell Observatory has produced high-resolution images of main-belt asteroid (44) Nysa that show two prominent valleys the researchers interpret as necks between three lobes gently joined into one body, according to a Universe Today writeup on phys.org. The team used SHARK-VIS on the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona and SPHERE/ZIMPOL on the Very Large Telescope in Chile with adaptive optics. Nysa is among the brightest and largest E-type asteroids, with an enstatite-rich surface. Contact binaries such as comet 67P and Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth are known; the writeup says Nysa would be the first contact trinary on the books if the three-lobe reading holds. The team also leaves open that Nysa could be a single deeply indented body. Using high-contrast methods borrowed from exoplanet imaging, the observers pulled a roughly 1 kilometer satellite, designated S/2026 (44) 1, from Nysa's glare at least 170 kilometers from the about 75-kilometer primary, spotted in two separate runs. Tracking the moon's orbit can yield mass and density to test whether Nysa is loose debris or coherent rock. The findings appear on the arXiv preprint server (DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2607.25786).