Photo Credit: Mark Garlick | Science Photo Library via Getty Images
Earth has got a new mini-moon for the next couple of days and it has fascinated people across social media. Albeit, it might not be visible to the naked eye without a telescope due to its small size. Celebrating the arrival of this mini-moon, named Asteroid 2024 PT5, many users on TikTok have shared clips to spread more information about this mini-visitor.
Here is all the information about the mini-moon and how much time it is going to stay in Earth’s orbit.
Earth’s new ‘Mini moon’ explained
The new mini-moon is an asteroid that has been making its way toward Earth for a long time now.
According to The Independent, this asteroid will be in Earth’s orbit till November, after which it will travel on its way to a new orbit. Furthermore, people learned about this asteroid when it scientists spotted it while working as a part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System. This moon can either be a part of a bigger asteroid or a human-made object created due to space junk.
As per the outlet, the NASA-created alert system that spotted the moon is a program implemented to look out for potentially harmful objects near Earth. Recently, Dr. Jennifer Millard from the Awesome Astronomy podcast also talked about this new mini-moon with BBC. She said, ”It’s not going to complete a full revolution of our planet, it’s just going to kind of have its orbit altered, just twisted slightly by our own planet and then it’ll continue on its merry way.”
BBC’s report further states that the asteroid is approximately 32 feet in length, much smaller when compared to Earth’s original moon. Additionally, a TikTok user named @heisenberghacker also shared a video with information about the mini-moon’s duration, which is for two months, leaving on November 25.
Here’s the video shared on TikTok:
Talking about the possible ways in which people can view the moon, Millard said, ”Professional telescopes, they’ll be able to pick it up. So you’ll be able to look out for lots of wonderful pictures online of this little dot kind of moving past the stars at great speed.”
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