Earth is about to flirt with a new natural satellite, gaining a second ‘mini moon’ for 57 days.
Our relationship with THE moon has lasted around 4.6 billion years, so she doesn’t have to feel too threatened.
But the newcomer, an asteroid set to be ‘captured’ by our planet’s gravity on September 29, is getting attention as it’s a rare occurrence for us to get an additional space rock companion.
Named 2024 PT5, it is only ten metres long, so a tiny speck compared to the moon itself.
It is set to be pulled into a brief whirl around before flying back into space on November 25, after 56.6 days alongside us.
The new little friend was reported in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, which said that Near-Earth objects (NEOs) approaching at close range ‘may undergo mini-moon events in which their geocentric energy becomes negative for hours, days or months’.
Sometimes they even start to briefly orbit earth, such as a bonus moon we had from July 2006 to July 2007.
The one arriving this month is not expected to do a full loop around Earth, and there’s therefore some debate about if it is truly a mini-moon.
And adding a further twist, the asteroid may even have originated as part of our own moon.
Paul Chodas, the director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the New York Times that its past motion indicates it is ‘possibly a piece of ejecta from an impact on the moon’.
Adding to the chain of moons, a leading theory of how our own moon came to be there is that it was once part of Earth, until a big chunk was knocked out of it in a ‘giant impact’ with another small planet.
Looked at that way, the arrival of 2024 PT5 could be a brief family reunion.
Sadly, the asteroid will be too small to see with the naked eye, and so we’ll be relying on advanced telescopes to get a glimpse.
But it is predicted to come back for another visit in 2055, and by then maybe we’ll be able to see it on our smartphones or AR glasses.
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