Earth Traps A Second Moon And It Was Nearly Mistaken For Space Junk
Earth has adopted a new second moon, though it won't be staying very long. Meet 2026 QQ8, a pint-sized asteroid that our planet’s gravity reeled in earlier this year. So no, it's not some dramatic, glowing second orb hanging in the night sky like the twin moons of Mars. This little space rock is roughly the size of dining table (somewhere between three and six feet across) and it is so tiny that after astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky first spotted it back in August, scientists weren't immediately sure what exactly they were looking at.
The eccentric trajectory of the rock created a debate as to whether it was actually space junk or an actual asteroid. Given how much metallic debris we have inadvertently launched into orbit over the decades, it is completely valid to think the former. However, a collaborative effort using heavy-hitting instruments like the Lowell Discovery Telescope and...
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