That's a minimoon, actually. And while there's one big Moon that everyone
knows and loves, it's not the only natural satellite that orbits the Earth:
Scientists believe that at any given time there are about
a thousand larger-than-a-softball minimoons in our planet's gravitational
pull, and about
one or two of those are the size of dishwashers. They stay around
Earth for between six and 18 months before heading off, back in thrall
to the sun's gravitational pull.
Larger minimoons arrive too, but less frequently. A minimoon about
the size of a school bus probably comes and hangs out every half century
or so; one the size of a football field may come about once every 100,000
years. "A hundred thousand years is about the time frame that human
beings have been doing things like leaving their handprints on cave
walls, so maybe in that time frame somebody once actually looked into
the sky and saw a mini-moon moving across the sky," Robert Jedicke,
who studies these minimoons, told National
Geographic last year.
More from
The Atlantic.
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