Asteroid 2024 PT5, which will pass close to Earth in late September, will briefly become a mini-moon.
Oku.Az RBC reported on this.
Researchers from the American Astronomical Society said that such an object is approaching Earth’s orbit. The new satellite is expected to accompany the planet from September 29 to November 25, 2024.
“The fact that a new satellite has been captured by a planet is not unique, but it is interesting that we are talking about an asteroid 10 metres in size,” said Sergei Bogachev, head of the Solar Astronomy Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
According to him, there are several million such objects in the solar system.
The astronomer is certain that the combined gravitational force of the Moon and Earth will remove it very soon.
According to him, the incident does not seem surprising, but it is unlikely to happen very often.
Federica Spoto, an asteroid dynamics researcher at Harvard and the Smithsonian Astrophysics Center, said observations of 2024 PT5 will increase scientists’ knowledge of space objects that approach and collide with Earth.
The New York Times notes that asteroids that cannot escape Earth’s gravity and fall into its orbit are called minimoons. They are difficult to detect and identify officially and sometimes turn out to be man-made objects – space debris.
