A mini moon that will bid farewell to Earth soon may in fact be a small hunk of the big moon — the one that has loomed far longer in the sky than humans have roamed the planet.
A follow-up study has taken a closer look at the bus-sized space rock to better understand what it’s made of, how fast it’s spinning, and where it’s traveling. A team of researchers says the mini moon is something in between an S-type asteroid, made of silicates and metal, and a V-type like Vesta, the second-largest object in the main asteroid belt.
Though the results were not conclusive, they suggest the mini moon, officially referred to as 2024 PT5, has a lunar origin, closely matching powder collected by the Soviet Union’s robotic Luna 24 mission in 1976, followed by samples from NASA‘s Apollo 12 mission in 1969. Both of those specimens came from maria, dark shadowy-looking lunar regions of ancient hardened lava flows.
The paper, whose authors include the two astronomers who discovered the mini moon in August, proposes that 2024 PT5 may have emerged from craters formed during the past 1 million years or so. The manuscript is under peer review for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters.
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