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Moon Space

Earth's 'Mini Moon' May Have Been a Chunk of Our Actual Moon (apnews.com) 15

Posted by BeauHD from the looks-familiar dept.
An asteroid named 2024 PT5, recently exhibiting "mini moon" behavior around Earth, may have been a boulder that was blasted off the moon by an impacting, crater-forming asteroid," reports the Associated Press. The 33-foot space rock is expected to pass safely near Earth in January, when it will be closely observed. From the report: While not technically a moon -- NASA stresses it was never captured by Earth's gravity and fully in orbit -- it's "an interesting object" worthy of study. The astrophysicist brothers who identified the asteroid's "mini moon behavior," Raul and Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of Complutense University of Madrid, have collaborated with telescopes in the Canary Islands for hundreds of observations so far.

Currently more than 2 million miles (3.5 million kilometers) away, the object is too small and faint to see without a powerful telescope. It will pass as close as 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) of Earth in January, maintaining a safe distance before it zooms farther into the solar system while orbiting the sun, not to return until 2055. That's almost five times farther than the moon. [...] NASA will track the asteroid for more than a week in January using the Goldstone solar system radar antenna in California's Mojave Desert, part of the Deep Space Network.

Earth's 'Mini Moon' May Have Been a Chunk of Our Actual Moon More | Reply

Earth's 'Mini Moon' May Have Been a Chunk of Our Actual Moon

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  • I load Slashdot, and suddenly I have all these goddamn ads despite having AdBlock Plus enabled. I had my wife try to load the site, as she has uBlock Origin and she was seeing the fucking ads, too.

    • /. has ads? I never had a problem blocking them, set it up once and never really had to do anything. Even just using a hosts file seems to knock out the annoying images and animated banners. I started blocking everything the moment that ads based on my amazon browsing history started showing up. That was way too fucked up for me to put up with ads any longer.

      Maybe you have some malware that's loading ads on top of what you're already seeing? I think uBlock has some configuration to pull from blocking lists

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by stwrtpj ( 518864 )
        Dude, I'm on Linux. I don't have any malware on my machine. If you look at the previous Slashdot article, you'll see other people having the same problem. Also I had my wife check this on a completely separate computer (ALSO running Linux) and got the same result.
    • Ad block plus is old, most have move on to ublock origin and private badger. Some ad blocking apps give you 30 days free trial then you have to pay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Slashdot is entitled to some ad money too.

  • So what happens in 2055?

    • So what happens in 2055?

      It will pass within a few million kilometers of Earth with a probability of less than 0.001% of impact.

      It's 10 meters in diameter with a mass of about 1500 tonnes.

      For comparison, the Chelyabinsk meteor was about 10,000 tonnes.

      TL;DR: This isn't something you need to worry about.

  • That's no moon....

  • Can someone explain why this asteroid, and any planet/moon/star etc orbit instead of just flying straight through space? Magnets only work over a short distance, why does gravity affect things so far away? And why does more mass = more gravity? A pool ball doesn't go into orbit around the ball its hit towards. I asked AI but it gave circular logic basically restating my question and not answering why.

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