Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist.
Earth is set to gain another moon by the end of the month — a small asteroid that will be snared by our planet's gravity until the end of the year, scientists say.
Our planet occasionally snags extra moons. For instance, a similar event occurred in 1981 and 2022, when the object 2022 NX 1 became an ephemeral companion to our planet before swinging further away, the astronomers noted. The researchers published their findings in September in the journal Research Notes of the AAS.
NASA deems any space object that comes within about 120 million miles of Earth a"near-Earth object" and classifies any large object within around 4.7 million miles of our planet as"potentially hazardous." NASA tracks the locations and orbits of roughly 28,000 asteroids usingATLAS, an array of four telescopes that performs a scan of the entire night sky every 24 hours.
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