{"id":4857,"date":"2025-05-04T10:30:57","date_gmt":"2025-05-04T10:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/04\/rocks-circling-near-earth-could-be-a-chunk-of-the-moon\/"},"modified":"2025-05-04T10:30:59","modified_gmt":"2025-05-04T10:30:59","slug":"rocks-circling-near-earth-could-be-a-chunk-of-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/04\/rocks-circling-near-earth-could-be-a-chunk-of-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocks Circling Near Earth Could Be A Chunk Of The Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A whole population of ‘minimoons’ – tiny natural satellites – may be quietly circling near Earth, scientists now believe, after discovering a second Moon-origin rock drifting close to our planet.<\/p>\n

The newly observed object, named 2024 PT5, was spotted near Earth last August and is thought to be a lunar fragment, possibly blasted off the Moon during a massive impact long ago. This makes it only the second known piece of the Moon found orbiting in near-Earth space.<\/p>\n

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“If there were only one object, that would be interesting but an outlier,” said Teddy Kareta, a planetary scientist at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. “If there’s two, we’re pretty confident that’s a population.”<\/p>\n

The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/a> in January and presented in March at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference in Texas.<\/p>\n

2024 PT5 stood out when it was first observed by astronomers in South Africa, thanks to its unusually slow movement, just 2 metres per second relative to Earth. That made it a promising candidate for the Mission Accessible Near-Earth Object Survey (MANOS), which focuses on finding asteroids that are easiest to reach with spacecraft.<\/p>\n

The rock, just 26 to 39 feet (8 to 12 metres) wide, didn’t look like a typical asteroid. Mr Kareta and his team believe it may have been ejected from the Moon’s surface during a violent impact.<\/p>\n

The discovery suggests that other such fragments might be hiding in near-Earth space. Earth regularly travels through a cloud of debris, both natural and man-made, as it orbits the Sun. Some of it is leftover rock from the early solar system, and scientists keep a close eye on these near-Earth objects (NEOs) in case any pose a threat.<\/p>\n

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Material that gets blasted off the Moon during an impact usually stays close to Earth’s orbit, especially the slower pieces. 2024 PT5 was briefly called a minimoon in September because it moved alongside Earth for a short time. But it didn’t stay for long and eventually drifted away. Scientists think it will come close to Earth again in 2055.<\/p>\n

Within a week of the discovery, Mr Kareta and MANOS principal investigator Nick Moskovitz turned the Lowell Discovery Telescope toward 2024 PT5. After analysing the rock in visible and near-infrared light, they found its composition closely resembled moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions and the Soviet Luna 24 mission.<\/p>\n

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“It’s like realising a crime scene has a totally new kind of evidence you didn’t know you had before,” Mr Kareta told Space.com<\/a>. “It might not help you solve the crime right away, but considering the importance of the task, new details to compare are always welcome.”<\/p>\n

This is only the second known lunar fragment spotted in near-Earth space. The first, called Kamo’oalewa, was discovered in 2016 and linked to the Moon in 2021.<\/p>\n


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A whole population of ‘minimoons’ – tiny natural satellites – may be quietly circling near Earth, scientists now believe, after discovering a second Moon-origin rock drifting close to our planet. The newly observed object, named 2024 PT5, was spotted near Earth last August and is thought to be a lunar fragment, possibly blasted off the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4858,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4857"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4859,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857\/revisions\/4859"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}