A Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) named Kamo'oalewa orbiting our planet is actually a piece of the Moon, a new study has found.
Asteroids, sometimes also called minor planets, are rocky, airless remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. The current known asteroid count is 1,308,871, according to NASA.
The asteroid Kamo'oalewa was first discovered in 2016 and categorised as a quasi-satellite, a type of object that co-orbit with our planet. It was earlier assumed that it is also one of them.
Asteroid Kamo'oalewa - a Hawaiian term that means "the oscillating fragment", is a Ferris-wheel-size - between 120 and 300 feet wide, rock chunk that orbits within 14.4 million kilometres of Earth every April, according to Live Science.
The similarity of its reflectance spectrum to lunar silicates and its Earth-like orbit both suggest that it originated from the lunar surface, according to the journal Nature.
Now, researchers at the University of Arizona claimed they have evidence that it was likely created by an ancient lunar collision.
"We are now establishing that the Moon is a more likely source of Kamo'oalewa", Renu Malhotra, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, said in a statement following the new discovery. "We looked at Kamo'oalewa's spectrum only because it was in an unusual orbit. If it had been a typical near-Earth asteroid, no one would have thought to find its spectrum and we wouldn't have known Kamo'oalewa could be a lunar fragment," Malhotra said.
"We are now establishing that the Moon is a more likely source of Kamo'oalewa", Renu Malhotra, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, said in a statement following the new discovery.
"We looked at Kamo'oalewa's spectrum only because it was in an unusual orbit. If it had been a typical near-Earth asteroid, no one would have thought to find its spectrum and we wouldn't have known Kamo'oalewa could be a lunar fragment," Malhotra said.
The study authors also concluded that Kamo‘oalewa is unlikely to be an artificial remnant from an earlier lunar mission. Its modest inclination could be indicative of a temporarily captured Near Earth Asteroid (NEA), as is speculated for other planetary co-orbitals.
The other proposed scenarios are that Kamo‘oalewa might have originated in the Earth-Moon system, either from a hitherto undiscovered quasi-stable population of Earth’s Trojans or as a lunar ejecta from a meteoroidal impact.
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