Earth is about to gain a new “mini-moon,” but it won’t stay around for long.
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The newly discovered asteroid, named 2024 PT5, will temporarily be captured by Earth’s gravity and orbit our world from Sept. 29 to Nov. 25, according to astronomers. Then, the space rock will return to a heliocentric orbit, which is an orbit around the sun.
Details about the ephemeral mini-moon were published this month in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
Astronomers first spotted the asteroid on Aug. 7 using the South Africa-based observatory of the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS.
The asteroid is likely about 37 feet in diameter, but more observations and data are needed to confirm its size, said lead study author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a researcher on the faculty of mathematical sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid.
The space rock could be as large as 138 feet in diameter, potentially larger than the asteroid that entered Earth’s atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013. About 55 to 65 feet in size, the Chelyabinsk asteroid exploded in the air, releasing 20 to 30 times more energy than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and generating brightness greater than the sun. Debris from the space rock damaged more than 7,000 buildings and injured more than 1,000 people.
But as a mini-moon, Asteroid 2024 PT5 isn’t in any danger of colliding with Earth now or over the next few decades, de la Fuente Marcos said. The space rock will orbit about 2.6 million miles away, or about 10 times the distance between Earth and the moon.
Some mini-moons — “temporarily captured orbiters” — can stay in orbit for multiple years, de la Fuente Marcos said. Those events are rare, occurring every 10 or 20 years.
But other asteroids — like 2024 PT5 — are mini-moons for a matter of days, weeks or a few months, he said.
It’s not easy for asteroids to become mini-moons because they have to be traveling at just the right speed and direction to be captured by Earth’s gravity.
Asteroid 2024 PT5 came from the Arjuna asteroid belt, which is made of small asteroids that have orbits around the sun similar to Earth’s orbit.
De la Fuente Marcos and his colleagues plan to observe 2024 PT5 to collect more data and details using the Gran Telescopio Canarias and the Two-Meter Twin Telescope, both on Spain’s Canary Islands. The asteroid will be too small and dim for amateur telescopes or binoculars to observe, he said, and it won’t create any observable effects on Earth.
After 56.6 days, the sun’s gravitational pull will bring Asteroid 2024 PT5 back into its normal orbit.
The space rock is expected to make a close flyby of Earth, 1.1 million miles away, on January 9, 2025, before “leaving the neighborhood of Earth shortly afterwards, until its next return in 2055,” according to the study.
And when Asteroid 2024 PT5 comes back around again, astronomers expect it to become Earth’s mini-moon for a few days in November 2055 and again for a few weeks in early 2084.
The-CNN-Wire
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