A Fleeting Moment in the Solar System
Earth has lost its mini-moon.
by Marina Koren
Mar 20, 2020
4 minutes
For a brief time, Earth had two moons.
The first, of course, was the one we’ve always had. The other was a fairly recent addition, about the size of a compact car— too tiny to tug on any oceans and invisible to the naked eye. In a chance encounter, gravitational forces had pulled the space rock away from an orbit around the sun and tossed it into one around us.
The discovery of the miniature moon, known as 2020 CD3, was in February, to the delight of people around the world, including those well beyond the usual crowd of stargazers. According to
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