Look up to the skies and (try) to see the Freddie Mercury asteroid
LONDON -- Queen frontman Freddie Mercury made a bold bid for astronomical immortality in the 1970s with the line, "I'm a shooting star leaping through the sky, like a tiger defying the laws of gravity." (He then dashed any credibility to his claim by mixing his metaphors, "I'm travelling at the speed of light, I wanna make a supersonic man out of you", but we'll gloss over that.)
Professional space nut and sometimes Queen guitarist Brian May has overlooked his bandmate's astrophysical faux pas by paying tribute to him in a YouTube post, in which he announces 'Asteroid 17473 Freddiemercury’ has been named in Mercury's honour.
The asteroid's new designation, which marks what would have been Mercury's 70th birthday, measures 3.5 km wide and can be found in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But you'll be hard pressed to spot it with your Argos telescope.
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Here's May to explain why: "It has an albedo of about 0.3 -- which means it only reflects about 30 percent of the light that falls on it; like many asteroids, it’s a dark object -- rather like a cinder in space. Viewed from the Earth, it is more than 10,000 times fainter than you can see by eye, so you need a fair-sized telescope to see it… and that’s why it wasn’t discovered until 1991."
The new name has officially been adopted by the International Astronomical Union -- the only official way to name a cosmic body -- and published by the Minor Planet Center.
“Singer Freddie Mercury sang, ‘I'm a shooting star leaping through the sky’ -- and now that is even more true than ever before," said research astronomer Joel Parker of the Southwest Research Institute, one of the men behind the tribute, in a press release emailed to Mashable.
Thankfully they didn't pick out the lyric: "I'm a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva."
