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Earth has another "moon" - at least for another 300 years - Walla! technology

2021-11-16T21:57:03.286Z


The mysterious origins of an asteroid that has been orbiting the Earth for 500 years and is commonly referred to as the "Second Moon of the Earth" may have finally been revealed - thanks to a new study


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16/11/2021

Tuesday, 16 November 2021, 23:41

Earth has another "moon" - at least for another 300 years

The mysterious origins of an asteroid that has been orbiting the Earth for 500 years and is commonly referred to as the "Second Moon of the Earth" may have finally been revealed - thanks to a new study

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NASA: Water was first found on the illuminated part of the moon (Photo: Reuters, Edited by: Assaf Drori)

Humanity is very much associated with the moon. We wrote thousands of songs and stories about it and even managed to get to it - after all we only have one moon, unlike Jupiter or Saturn where there are dozens of moons to choose from. For us, it's whitening - or nothing. or not? It turns out that there is another type of moon that is in a kind of orbit around the earth and was only discovered in 2016 even though it has been orbiting the earth for 500 years. We do not know much about it, but now according to a new study published in the journal Nature, we may finally know how it was formed.



This kind of moon - which is actually an asteroid called Kamuvalwa (after a Hawaiian word referring to a moving celestial object) - does not have much space: it is less than 50 meters in diameter and it orbits the Earth in a spiral-like spiral orbit that brings it closer More than 40 to 100 times the moon's distance from Earth (which is 384,000 km from us). Its strange flight path is caused by the competing gravitational forces of Earth and the Sun, which prevent it from reaching a more conventional orbit.



"It's mostly influenced by the sun's gravity, but this pattern appears because it's also - but not really - in orbit around the Earth. So it's that kind of weird dance," says Ben Shrecki, a graduate student at the University of Arizona's Laboratory for the Study of the Moon and Stars. Of the new study.

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This is not to say that Kamu'alwa must have a particularly exotic source. Our solar system is littered with asteroids, some of which are captured by the gravitational pull of other planets and become more conventional moons - even if their orbits are fragmented. Others do not orbit other planets in the conventional way but line up in front of or behind them and accompany them in their orbits around the sun, like the Trojan asteroids that precede and follow Jupiter.



Either way, Camuvala attracted special attention mainly because it is different in appearance from a regular asteroid and therefore its composition was a mystery. Asteroids tend to be clearly reflected at certain infrared frequencies, but camouflage is not. It is dimmer - which implies that it is made of different materials so it probably came from a different source.



But where did he come from?

TIME reported that in order to investigate the mystery, Shrek, under the guidance of his doctoral advisor, astronomer Vishnu Reddy, first turned to a NASA-operated telescope in Hawaii that is routinely used to study asteroids in the Earth's environment. signing infrared seemed too weak. instead, they moved the telescope Monokolri run by the University of Arizona, as he said Sharki could "squeeze every last ounce of photons this object."



telescope has yielded better results and clearer, but still they were not Integrity The rock was found to be made of silicates as common as other asteroids, but they were common only in their overall composition, not in their infrared signature, which remained extinct.

This is what the strange route of Kamuvalwa looks like

Finally, the answer "offered itself" - if Kamuvalwa acts like a kind of moon, maybe it's because it's actually part of the moon itself? Earlier during Shrek's PhD, one of his advisers published an article on lunar samples returned by the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. When Shrek compared the data he received with his telescope with what previous geologists found in rock research laboratories, the results matched perfectly. The difference in infrared reflectivity between common asteroids and camouflage was due to what happens to silicates while they are still on the moon's surface.



"Visually, what we see is utilized silicate," Shrek explained. "Ages of exposure to the space environment and the effects of micro-meteorite, it's almost like a fingerprint and hard to miss." Shrek explained that even the question of how Kamuvalwa detached from the moon is not a mysterious mystery - the moon has been bombarded by space rocks for billions of years, resulting in all sorts of moon debris being ejected into space (with much of it reaching the earth as meteorites). Kamuvalwa is such a piece of lunar debris that has moved away from it in a spiral motion, but instead of landing on Earth or just plunging into the void, it has found itself as a sort of satellite in itself.



"We see thousands of craters on the moon, so some of that lunar emission must remain in space," says Shrek, adding that Kamuvala will not stay with us that long - because its current orbit is not completely stable.

According to estimates by Shrek and other scientists, it will remain a companion of the Earth for only another 300 years and then it will be released from its current gravitational chains and disappear into the void.

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Source: walla

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