In what could be one of the biggest discoveries of the century, NASA declared that the Earth has a second moon orbiting it.
It isn’t exactly as big as the first one, in-fact, it is an asteroid spanning about 40 meters across and 100 meters wide.
Name as HO3, the asteroid was discovered on April 27 using the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii. What’s interesting is that it has been around for over a century and yet had managed to remain elusive.
The natural satellite has an irregular path of orbit around the earth, which is why it has managed to stay hidden for so long. The asteroid tilted at 8 degrees and has a highly elliptical orbit – and travels 38 to 100 times further distance than the first moon.
“Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to hold onto the asteroid so that it never wanders farther away than about 100 times the distance of the moon,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“The same effect also prevents the asteroid from approaching much closer than about 38 times the distance of the moon. In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth,” he added.
