Earth's got a new 'moon' - here's what to expect
The Minor Planet Centre has just announced that the Earth has been orbited by a second moon for the past three years or so. But while excitement about the discovery is growing, it is important to keep in mind that this moon isn’t as impressive as our main satellite. It is extremely faint – it is estimated to be only between one and six metres across – and won’t be with us for much longer.
The body was first spotted by US astronomers Theodore Pruyne and Kacper Wierzchos using a 1.52-metre (60 inch) telescope at Mount Lemmon Observatory near Tuscon, Arizona on February 15.
Subsequent observations enabled its orbit to be calculated, and at 22:53 Universal Time (UT) on February 25, the Minor Planet Center announced the discovery, designating it as 2020 CD₃ and confirming that it is temporarily bound to the Earth.
The object 2020 CD₃ is essentially just a tiny member of a class of asteroids whose orbits cross the Earth’s orbit. Occasionally, they come near or collide with the Earth, but in this case a collision would not have been a catastrophe for us because 2020 CD₃ is so small that it would have broken up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground.
https://news.yahoo.com/earths-got-moon-heres-expect-164018470.html
