UMD non-astronomers make a big discovery

This is cool;  students in an astronomy class for non-astronomers took a look at some asteroid data and made a remarkable discovery;  that what was thought as one asteroid was actually two of them orbiting around each other.

That's something that will look good on their resumes.  And it must have been basically fun to do.

Rare eclipsing double asteroid discovered

Student teams studying 3905 Doppler met over four nights in October 2013. Each four-person team observed and photographed the asteroid, using a privately owned telescope in Nerpio, Spain, which they accessed and controlled over the internet. Their main task was to photograph changes in the intensity of each asteroid's reflected light and turn those images into a lightcurve.
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"When we looked at the images we didn't realize we had anything special, because the brightness difference is not something you can see with your eyes," Hayes-Gehrke said. But when the two teams studying 3905 Doppler used a computer program to chart its lightcurve, they found the asteroid's light occasionally faded to nearly nothing. 

"It was incredibly frustrating," said Alec Bartek, a senior physics major from Brookeville, MD. "For some reason our light curve didn't look right. 

It was as though the rotating rock had suddenly gone dark -- and Hayes-Gehrke suspected that's exactly what was happening. She thought 3905 Doppler was actually two asteroids orbiting one another. When one of the two asteroids blocked the telescope's view of its companion, the result was an asteroid eclipse -- and a sharp dip in the light curve.

And somewhat appropriately, the name of the asteroid that is now two asteroids is 3905 Doppler.