“A mini-moon is a small object orbiting another solar system body,” said Daniel Brown, an associate professor in astronomy at Nottingham Trent University.<\/p>\n
It can either be made of rock, which is an asteroid or a mixture of rock, dust and ice, which is a comet.<\/p>\n
“In either case, we have to think about these not orbiting around us forever but for a short amount of time,” said Dr Brown.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
2024 PT5 was first discovered in August last year, the day before it approached Earth at a distance of 353,200 miles (568,500km).<\/p>\n
It belongs to the Arjuna asteroid belt, a group of space rocks in the solar system that revolve around the Sun.<\/p>\n
Dr Brown said the mini-moon will orbit Earth for 57 days before eventually swinging out of the planet’s gravitational pull.<\/p>\n
“There is nothing explosive or dramatic happening to it for it to leave, it simply has too much energy to hang around us for too long,” he said.<\/p>\n
The mini-moon will be back<\/strong><\/p>\nAlthough a temporary visitor, Earth will not see the last of this mini-moon.<\/p>\n
Scientists predict it will re-enter our orbit in 2055.<\/p>\n
This is not the first time the Earth has had a mini-moon.<\/p>\n
Four years ago, scientists identified another mini-moon called 2020 CD3, which orbited the Earth for more than a year.<\/p>\n
Read more: New mini-moon discovered orbiting Earth – but it’s only temporary<\/strong><\/p>\nDr Brown said mini-moons are fairly common but “what tends to be less common is being able to observe them, as they are small, very faint and very fast-moving”.<\/p>\n
This year’s mini-moon will not be visible to the naked eye and can only be seen through telescopes.<\/p>\n
2024 PT5 is a near-Earth object – a group of space rocks that pass by Earth regularly.<\/p>\n
Astronomers track these objects in case they are a threat to Earth in the future but experts said it is unlikely 2024 PT5 will pose such a risk.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on sky.com<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The moon will get a companion this week as an asteroid around the length of a double-decker bus enters Earth’s orbit. The temporary guest, called 2024 PT5, should arrive on 29 September and is expected to befriend the regular moon for around two months. “A mini-moon is a small object orbiting another solar system body,” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8082","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}