Scientists Found A Second Moon Orbiting Earth!
How was Earth’s second moon discovered?
Earth’s quasi-moon, Kamo’oalewa, was discovered in 2016. According to TIME, it measures at less than 50 meters across, and orbits Earth in a corkscrew motion, traveling up to 100 times the distance our regular moon does.
“It’s primarily influenced just by the sun’s gravity, but this pattern shows up because it’s also — but not quite — on an Earth-like orbit. So it’s this sort of odd dance,” University of Arizona graduate student, Ben Sharkey, who wrote the report, told TIME.
Kamo’oalewa is assumed to be a piece of an asteroid or the original moon, which somehow synched into orbit with planet Earth. It appears more dimly-lit than most moons, and was first discovered with a NASA-run telescope in Hawaii. It was then magnified with a monocular telescope that shed a little extra light on it.
It has similar samples to what was brought back from the moon from a mission in 1971, so if it is part of the moon, it’s because it was bombarded by another space rock.
But scientists are pretty sure she’s only temporary. Kamo’oalewa might only be here for a few hundred more years before it stops orbiting Earth. Its trajectory is “unstable,” and it will likely break out of the orbit and travel through space after 300 years or so.
“Visually, what you’re seeing is weathered silicate,” Sharkey told TIME. “The eons of exposure to space environment and the micrometeorite impacts, it’s almost like a fingerprint and it’s hard to miss.”
“We see thousands of craters on the moon, so some of this lunar ejecta has to be sticking around in space.”
The obvious issue is: where did this object come from? The solutions are hypothetical. One theory is that it was captured by the general population of NEOs in its Earth-like orbit.
Its low eccentricity and inclination, on the other hand, are unusual for captured co-orbital states in numerical simulations.
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