KONTAN.CO.ID -Jakarta. Scientists find the missing piece of the Moon, a space rock orbiting Earth. The space rock is said to glow faintly for several weeks every April.
Not long ago scientists revealed a new finding regarding a new finding regarding the missing part of the Moon.
As we know, the Moon is a satellite of the Earth that is always side by side. Talking about the Moon, it turns out that scientists found an old space rock that looks like a shard or missing part of the Moon.
The space object is named after Hawaii, namely Kamo’oalewa and has been published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
Quote from CNET, scientists looked at the spectrum of near-Earth asteroids that didn’t match up to an asteroid. So says Ben Sharkey, a graduate scientist in the Department of Planetary Science at University of Arizona and the main author of the journal.
Instead, Sharkey and other fellow scientists realized that it had a pattern of reflected light, or spectrum, that was closely related to the Moon rocks brought back from NASA’s Apollo missions.
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“These challenging observations were made possible by the enormous light-gathering power of the Large Binocular Telescope’s 8.4-meter twin telescopes,” said Al Conrad, a staff scientist at the Large Binocular Observatory and co-author of the study.
But that’s not the only evidence for the origin of the Kamo’oalewa moon fragment. Quasi-satellite which is a subcategory of near-Earth asteroids that orbit the sun and Earth around our planet at an unusual tilt.
That’s what causes the space rock to appear in the night sky once a year.
According to Renu Malhotra, a Professor of Planetary Sciences at University of Arizona, the space rock arrived at its current position 500 years ago. Malhotra also is that its trajectory will change in about 300 years.
Due to the rare appearance of Kamo’oalewa, it took scientists several years to collect data to finally paint a complete picture of the object. After finding enough evidence, scientists then confirmed its origins on the Moon.
How did the space rock separate from the Moon?
According to Reddy, Kamo’oalewa may be the first large space rock to be found separated from the Moon in one of the ancient collisions. Space.
However, there is still the possibility that the Kamo’oalewa space rock is really part of the Moon or an anomaly. Scientists also still don’t know if there are other moon fragments hidden in the solar system, which have yet to be found.
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