The Earth will have a new companion in the next few weeks: an asteroid will probably move around the planet in a horseshoe-shaped orbit from September 29 to November 25, researchers report. After that, it will fly further into space. “That’s pretty cool,” said astrophysicist Federica Spoto from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to the New York Times.
However, astro fans should not hope for two clearly visible moons in the night sky: “2024 PT5” is too small to be seen with the naked eye.
Rare event
Most asteroids whizz past Earth at a greater or lesser distance, and very rarely one enters our planet’s atmosphere or even creates a crater. Asteroid “2024 PT5” has a different fate: It is captured by Earth’s gravity and accompanies the planet for about eight weeks, as researchers report in the “Research Notes” of the American Astronomical Society.
“2024 PT5” was discovered with ground telescopes in early August. The chunk is only about ten meters in size. “The discovery of “2024 PT5″ reminds us that there is a pretty busy highway around the Earth,” said Spoto.
Mini-moon = moon fragment?
The fact that the asteroid is about to orbit the Earth for two months is crowned by a bizarre detail: the lump of rock is probably a piece of ejected material from an impact on the moon, it was said. The temporary miniature moon could therefore be a fragment of the actual moon.
Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid explain in their “Research Notes” that it is probably a so-called Arjuna asteroid with an Earth-like orbit around the sun. It is unlikely that it is an artificial object such as space junk due to its trajectory.
Those who dream of mining raw materials in space may be looking up to the skies with particular longing in the coming months: “Every time we talk about asteroid mining, we’re talking about mini-moons,” Spoto told the New York Times. A metal-rich rock orbiting the Earth would therefore be a nice target for prospectors.
And he’s coming back!
Similar visitors to “2024 PT5” have already been recorded several times: in 1981 and 2022, for example, “2022 NX1”, as stated in the “Research Notes”. It will return in 2051. “2024 PT5” will visit Earth next in 2055.
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