September 21st 2024.
Great news, folks! Our beloved planet Earth is about to gain a new mini-moon! Exciting, right? Well, I'm sorry to say that this mini-moon won't be staying for long. According to astronomers, our newest addition, a recently discovered asteroid named 2024 PT5, will only be orbiting our world from September 29 to November 25. After that, it will return to its usual orbit around the sun.
All the juicy details about this temporary mini-moon and its unique horseshoe-shaped orbit were recently published in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society. And get this, the asteroid was actually first spotted on August 7 by astronomers using the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) based in South Africa. Talk about impressive!
But wait, how big is this mini-moon exactly? Well, lead study author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, who is a researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, believes that it is around 11 meters in diameter. However, more observations and data are needed to confirm its size. It could potentially be anywhere between 5 and 42 meters in diameter, which is larger than the asteroid that caused quite a stir when it entered Earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013.
Don't worry though, this mini-moon won't be causing any destruction like its predecessor. In fact, it will be orbiting at a safe distance of about 4.2 million kilometers away from Earth, which is around 10 times the distance between our planet and the moon. Phew, that's a relief!
Now, let's talk about how this mini-moon came to be. According to de la Fuente Marcos, there are two types of mini-moon events. The first involves asteroids that are temporarily captured by Earth's gravity and complete one or more revolutions around our planet, lasting for years. The second type is like our mini-moon, where the asteroid doesn't even complete one full orbit before returning to its usual path. These short-term mini-moons, also known as temporarily captured flybys, only last for a few days, weeks, or months.
Earth has had other temporary mini-moons in the past, such as Asteroid 2020 CD3. This one was first spotted in February 2020 and departed a couple of months later, but research showed that it had actually been orbiting our planet for a few years before it was detected. However, it is considered a long-capture mini-moon, while 2024 PT5 is a short-capture one.
These short mini-moon events can happen several times per decade, but the long ones are rare and only occur every 10 or 20 years, according to de la Fuente Marcos. You see, it's not easy for an asteroid to become a mini-moon. It has to be traveling at just the right speed and direction to be captured by Earth's gravity. As Robert Jedicke, a specialist emeritus at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, explains, this can only happen when the asteroid approaches Earth slowly and at close range.
Now, here's a fun fact: Asteroid 2024 PT5 is actually from the Arjuna asteroid belt, which has similar orbits around the sun as Earth. And get this, Jedicke believes that there's always at least one mini-moon the size of a dishwasher in our Earth-Moon system, but they are just really hard to detect. He also estimates that 2024 PT5 is around 10 meters in diameter, making it the largest captured object discovered so far.
But where do these mini-moons come from? Jedicke believes that they could either be asteroids from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, or fragments of the lunar surface that were launched by asteroid impacts millions of years ago. Either way, determining their origins could help us better understand the process of crater formation and how material is ejected from the moon's surface.
For those of you who are interested in catching a glimpse of our mini-moon, unfortunately, it will be too small and dim for amateur telescopes or binoculars to observe. But don't worry, you won't be missing out on much. After 56.6 days, the asteroid will return to its normal orbit. However, it is expected to make a close flyby of Earth on January 9, 2025, before returning to our neighborhood in 2055 for a brief visit. And who knows, maybe we'll have more mini-moons to look forward to in the future. Keep your eyes on the sky, folks!
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