6.5 days old
40.8 percent lit
February 28, 2020
By Hannah Knowles
Images (click here) of the night sky capture little more than a white dot zipping across gray static. Without the helpful green circle, it’s easy to miss.
But two astronomers soon recognized the speck on their screens as something special: a likely “mini-moon” caught orbiting the Earth, only the second ever recorded.
With close to 1 million known asteroids — rubble from the birth of our solar system — but hardly any spotted circling our planet, this roughly compact-car-size object is “a big deal,” tweeted Kacper Wierzchos, one of the people who made the discovery.
Astronomers expect mini-moon sightings to grow far more common as a new, giant telescope going up in Chile starts scanning the sky. It’s an exciting prospect for scientists interested in someday sending a spacecraft to study one of the rocks and maybe even bring it back to Earth....
