Bizarre ‘Bone’ Asteroid Is Even Weirder Than We Imagined

It orbits between Mars and Jupiter (never getting closer to Earth than 120 million miles and is 168 kilometers long along its long axis. That’s big enough that I would not have expected this great of a divergence from a sphere.

it appears to be two oblong asteroids closely orbiting each other, with a bridge of dust and rubble connecting them. A close flyby past a planet would seem likely to tear the thing apart. Kleopatra is spinning fast enough that the far ends are probably experiencing “negative” gravity due to centrifugal forces. Kleopatra also has two small moons, the details of which remain murky due to the difficulty of seeing them at this distance.