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It’s called Kamo’oalewa, no we aren’t joking and no you probably won’t be able to see it any time soon. Compared to its gargantuan partner in Earth’s orbit, Kamo’oalewa, a name that roughly translates to “the oscillating celestial fragment,” according to Live Science is absurdly tiny by comparison to our moon Luna and approximately 40 times further away. The small meteor-like fragment has long been considered to be a ‘quasi-satellite’, which nature.com describes as “a class of near-Earth small solar system bodies that orbit the sun but remain close to the Earth because they are faint and difficult to observe.”
“It’s primarily influenced just by the sun’s gravity, but this pattern shows up because it’s also — but not quite — on an Earth-like orbit. So it’s this sort of odd dance,” said graduate student Ben Sharkey of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, who is the lead author of a recent paper trying to identify the moonlet’s origins, The Western Journal reported.
Wait… Another Moon?
The tiny body (by astronomical standards) is only 190 feet in diameter with its near-earth orbit distorted between the Earth’s gravity and the Sun’s. Astronomers have struggled with identifying the origins of smaller celestial bodies such as Kamo`oalewa. But new observations using the Large Binocular Telescope at the Kitt’s Peak Observatory in southern Arizona have revealed through the faint patterns of reflected light on its surface.
“It is very unlikely that a garden-variety near-Earth asteroid would spontaneously move into a quasi-satellite orbit like Kamo`oalewa’s,” study co-author Renu Malhotra, a planetary sciences professor at the University of Arizona, said in a statement.
Indeed the astonomers discovered that the reflected light and infrared signature didn’t match an asteroid… instead, they had to reach back into studies of moon rocks from the Apollo program. Specifically from Apollo 14 in 1971.
Boom. A match.
Kamo`oalewa, an odd asteroid that orbits in lock-step with the Earth, may be a chunk of the Moon that was broken off during a huge, ancient collision.
Just imagine watching that happen…https://t.co/D5pVwOKkuW pic.twitter.com/AuRarCNPgO— Corey S. Powell (@coreyspowell) November 12, 2021
“Visually, what you’re seeing is weathered silicate,” Sharkey said. “The eons of exposure to space environment and the micrometeorite impacts, it’s almost like a fingerprint and it’s hard to miss.” The moonlet was indeed not only our ‘second-moon’ since briefly in each orbit it is ripped from the sun’s pull by the Earth’s gravity, but it appears likely that Kamo`oalewa was born from a larger impact with the lunar surface that ejected it into its own orbit. So if not completely a ‘second-moon’ then possibly Luna Jr.?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YvOy8JSaPk&t=10s
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