Liked on YouTube: Earth Has Captured A New Mini Moon!

Earth Has Captured A New Mini Moon!
Earth Has Captured A New Mini Moon! Subscribe for more videos:https://www.youtube.com/c/InsaneCuriosity?sub_confirmation=1? One of the most beautiful and breathtaking sights we can experience here on Earth is when we look up in the night sky, and the Moon is there: full, bright and as round as they can be. But what if we come to a day when we will look at two of these? Is this even possible? Join us today as we find out! On February 15, 2020, astronomers Theodore Pruyne and Kacper Wierzchos were working on the Catalina Sky Survey at the Mount Lemmon Observatory when they noticed a weird object in the Virgo constellation. How is it weird you ask? Well, as they were observing this object, they noticed that it appears to be moving in the same manner as the Earth. So what do curious minds do when placed under this kind of circumstance? They investigate more. Pruyne and Wierzchos kept track of this object until they finally confirmed that this object indeed is following Earth. What they found may be a new mini-moon. I know, a second satellite orbiting Earth sounds extremely outrageous. Do you think this is the first time that this happened? Stay tuned to find out. This new moon candidate was designated with the name 2020 CD3. It spans at around 1.9 to 3.5 meters in diameter by average. Practically the height of two point guards from the NBA, if you stack them up head to toe. This object, as observed by scientists, is an asteroid. A really small one, for that. I bet you guys want to know how exactly the scientists determined that this was in fact an asteroid, don’t you? Well, let me explain. If you follow science news, the idea that this might actually be debris from other failed satellites was a huge possibility, but how they arrived at tossing this idea out of the window and stick with thinking “Okay, this definitely is an asteroid” was amazing. Bear with me with the explanation, alright? So, the material integrity of a manmade satellite differs from an asteroid by a huge margin. To its essence,, an asteroid is more “solid”, in a sense that it has a higher density as compared to, say, a satellite debris. By looking for this difference in characteristic in the object, the observers can make a conclusion on whether the object is an asteroid or not. To illustrate, say for example that we are on a beach, and we have a rock and a plastic bag. Don’t worry eco-warriors, it’s purely hypothetical. The plastic bag is not actually there. And let’s say, for instance, a wave comes and what do we expect the two objects to experience? We expect them to be washed away, right? Particularly, we expect the rock to move just a teeny-bit, or might even stay where it is, whereas, the plastic bag will behave differently. We expect it to act all floppy, and get washed away towards somewhere, maybe to a dryer part of the beach or be taken away by the ocean. This very same expectation was applied to 2020 CD3 to determine its nature. The wave that is going to cause the wobbly motion is the energy from the sun. As we have mentioned earlier, satellites are not as solid as they seem to be, at least if we compare them to asteroids. What the scientists observed was that the asteroid moves in a manner that can only happen if it were an asteroid. It’s absolute magnitude is measured to be around 31.7, which is extremely low. This also implies that this object doesn’t absorb that much light. This tells the scientists that this asteroid might belong to dark, carbonaceous C-type asteroids. From this characteristic and the diameter, the mass of this object was estimated to be 4900 kilograms. So scratch the basketball player analogy earlier. A better comparison would be, if we were to take the maximum diameter, the asteroid is like an elephant floating in space...all alone for eternity. So does this mean we’re going to see a black elephant sized object in the sky starting now? Well, I wouldn’t count on it. Let me explain. First of all, this object is 77,000 kilometers away from Earth at its perigee, or at its closest point. Yes, our first Moon is 384,400 km, but we have to keep in mind that in comparison, the orbit of the Moon is fairly less eccentric than 2020 CD3’s. Statistically speaking, we can say that most of the time, this new moon would be really far from Earth. So let’s go back to our main subject, 2020 CD3 and it being a temporary satellite. The original orbit of this asteroid is heliocentric. What this means is that its actual center of rotation is not Earth, but the Sun. Basically, it’s a normal Solar System object, in terms of how it moves. What’s special about it is that it moves at almost the same period as the Earth, at a relatively low speed. Remember the ingredients for a planet to capture a satellite that we mentioned earlier? Well, 2020 CD3 has all of these! #InsaneCuriosity #RecentSpaceDiscoveries #ToTheMoon
via YouTube https://youtu.be/J0NQxmxeXg4