Earth has a new mini-moon, but don’t get too attached
Space rocks much smaller than our moon might occasionally get stuck in our cosmic backyard. (Deposit Photos/)For the last two and a half years, the Earth may have had two moons. There’s the obvious one that raises the tides and can often be seen during the day, and now researchers have identified a candidate for a second. The “mini-moon,” as some are calling it, is a couch-sized speck roughly 10 trillion times dimmer than its more famous counterpart. And astronomers found the satellite just in time, because soon it will be gone forever. Kacper Wierzchos and Theodore Pruyne, astronomers with the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, first spotted the object. They estimate it measures between six and 12 feet long, and it streaked across the sky on February 15 while they scanned for asteroids. Now, after about ten days of observations by a handful of observatories, the Minor Planet Center has...