Earth’s moon will soon have company: a “minimoon.” The minimoon is actually an asteroid the size of a school bus, with a length of 10 meters. When it passes near Earth on Sunday, it will be temporarily trapped by our planet’s gravity and will orbit the globe, but only for about two months.
The space rock, 2024 PT5, was first discovered in August by astronomers at the Complutense University of Madrid using a powerful telescope located in Sutherland, South Africa.
These short-lived minimoons are probably more common than we think, said Richard Binzel, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The last known one was detected in 2020.
“This happens quite frequently, but we rarely see them because they are very small and very difficult to detect,” he said. “Only recently has our research capacity reached the point of routinely detecting them.”
The discovery by Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos was published by the American Astronomical Society.
This will not be visible to the naked eye or through amateur telescopes, but “it can be observed with relatively large research telescopes,” Carlos de la Fuente Marcos said in an email.
Binzel, who was not involved in the research, said it is unclear whether the space rock originated as an asteroid or as “a piece of the moon that was destroyed.”
The minimoon will circle the globe for almost 57 days, but will not complete a full orbit. On November 25, it will separate from Earth and continue its solo journey through the cosmos. It is expected to happen again in 2055.
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