admin The Minor Planet Center has recently announced that they have discovered a second moon of the Earth but you won’t be able to observe it with naked eyes because it is too tiny and temporary.
The new moon is named 2020 CD3 and has a width of between 1.9 to 3.5 m which is between 6.2 to 11.5 ft. It has no comparison to 3,474 km in diameter of our moon. Its approach was towards earth instead of colliding which ensured that it is going to remain in our gravitational orbit for a while.
Theodore Pruyne and Kacper Wierzchos, US astronomers, made the discovery on 15th of February via the telescope mounted at Mount Lemmon Observatory. Further observations made the orbit of the “new moon” clear and then the calculations were easy to find out that the object has been orbiting the Earth for three years now.
In 2006, an object then was named RH120 orbited Earth a few times between 2006 and 29007 was rejected. And the new object is just the second object to have been observed by the astronomers.
There are other celestial objects which technically orbit the moon and just happen to share the path of the Earth and our thus “claimed moons.” In 2016, an object named HO3 was discovered to be trailing behind Earth at a speed which was 13.6 times faster than our moon.
The 2020 CD3, according to the research results, will have a much shorter span as a mini-moon to the Earth. For now, it bound in Earth gravitational field but will again be left free in the space. Certain estimations say that it will be free in April 2020. Astronomers, without any doubt, will resume observing our tiny travelling companion closely for as long as it sticks around.
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