The Earth has a second moon. But she is very small and most likely not for long

The Center for the Study of Small Planets of the International Astronomical Union made a sensational announcement: the Earth has not one, but two natural satellites!

But do not rush to the street at night with binoculars: you still can’t see anything. Moon No. 2 is a large meteorite or small asteroid from two to 3.5 meters across.

For comparison: the diameter of the known moon is 3474 km.

On February 15, an object was accidentally spotted in a telescope during a regular sky observation session by astronomers Theodor Prue and Casper Verches from Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona, the latter reported on his Twitter account.

Further calculations showed that the 2020 CD3 space body is one of about a million asteroids inhabiting the solar system that flew past Earth and was captured by its attraction about three years ago. It completes a revolution around the Earth in 47 days.

Gregory Fedorets, a researcher at Queen’s University of Belfast, told New Scientist that he calculated that the new satellite would not stay with our planet forever. In April of this year, the combined effect of the gravitational fields of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun is likely to force him to leave Earth’s orbit and return to outer space.

For this reason, the Center for the Study of Small Planets officially assigned the mini-moon the status of not a satellite of the Earth, but a temporarily captured object.

A similar case occurred in September 2006 – June 2007 with a temporarily captured object 2006 RH120.

In addition, the asteroid 2016 HO3, discovered four years ago, accompanies the Earth for about a hundred years, but it does not rotate around the Earth, but around the Sun in an orbit parallel to the Earth’s orbit. The distance to it is 13.6 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

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