Earth is about to flirt with a new natural satellite – but you will probably struggle to see it.
Our relationship with THE moon has lasted around 4.6billion years, so she doesn’t have to feel too threatened.
But the newcomer, an asteroid set to be ‘captured’ by our planet’s gravity on Sunday (September 29), is getting attention as it’s a rare occurrence for us to get an additional space rock companion.
Named 2024 PT5 and nicknamed the mini-moon, it is only ten metres long, so a tiny speck compared to the moon itself.
Unfortunately it won’t be visible to the named eye because of its small size and dimness – but people with professional telescopes should be able to spot it.
It’s formed of dull rock, meaning home telescopes and binoculars won’t be able to pick it up.
Astronomer Dr Jennifer Millard told the BBC: ‘Professional telescopes, they’ll be able to pick it up. So you’ll be able to look out for lots of wonderful pictures online of this little dot kind of moving past the stars at great speed.
‘It’s not going to complete a full revolution of our planet, it’s just going to kind of have its orbit altered, just twisted slightly by our own planet and then it’ll continue on its merry way.’
It is set to be pulled into a brief whirl around before flying back into space on November 25, after 56.6 days alongside us.
The new little friend was reported in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, which said that Near-Earth objects (NEOs) approaching at close range ‘may undergo mini-moon events in which their geocentric energy becomes negative for hours, days or months’.
Sometimes they even start to briefly orbit earth, such as a bonus moon we had from July 2006 to July 2007.
The one arriving this month is not expected to do a full loop around Earth, and there’s therefore some debate about if it is truly a mini-moon.
And adding a further twist, the asteroid may even have originated as part of our own moon.
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Paul Chodas, the director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the New York Times that its past motion indicates it is ‘possibly a piece of ejecta from an impact on the moon’.
Adding to the chain of moons, a leading theory of how our own moon came to be there is that it was once part of Earth, until a big chunk was knocked out of it in a ‘giant impact’ with another small planet.
Looked at that way, the arrival of 2024 PT5 could be a brief family reunion.
And it is predicted to come back for another visit in 2055, and by then maybe we’ll be able to see it on our smartphones or AR glasses.
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