Kleopatra may be a dumbbell-shaped metallic rubble pile

One of my favorite space rocks is 216 Kleopatra.

It’s an asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it’s one of the biggest ones. The reason I love it is because of its shape: It looks like a cartoon dog bone or a dumbbell, two elongated lobes stuck together via a neck between them.

The exact shape, size, and other physical characteristics have been surprisingly difficult to pin down, but a couple of new papers have just been published by astronomers who used a suite of observatio...