Friday, March 30, 2012

More Than One Moon????

Hey Space Placers!

When you look up at the Moon this weekend or any other time, it is a beautiful sight - and there is nothing else like it as Earth has only one Moon, right? Well, wrong, if a recent study is correct.

A team of astronomers used a super computer to do a computation of what would happen to 10 million asteroids that came by Earth. After running the long and complicated computation, the result predicts that Earth should have at least one meter-sized moon that has been captured by the Earth's gravity. The asteroid-turned moon of Earth will only keep its special status for about nine months before it is tugged away from Earth's gravitational field and returned to the family of the Sun as an asteroid once again.

Astronomers have found asteroid-moons around Earth before and it is likely that much smaller asteroids than the one-meter size could be orbiting our planet.

Earth captures a minimoon


Sky Guy in VA


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