Scientists have found that when any large chunk separates from the Moon, it is likely that it is not very far from Earth. In this way, our moon is constantly spawning its own little copies.
Debris from the Moon
A team of scientists led by Robert Jedick of the University of Hawaii recently published a paper analyzing gravitationally bound objects to Earth — a variety of asteroids that never get very far from our planet.
The Moon is believed to have formed about 4.5 billion years ago as a result of a large celestial body called Theia colliding with Earth. Then the debris ejected into space came together to form our moon at a fairly small distance. Since then, it has been steadily moving away from us, and now the average distance to it is 384,000 kilometers.
And all this time, the Moon experiences collisions with other celestial bodies. Sometimes they are so powerful that pieces of tens and hundreds of meters in size break off from our moon and fly into space.
Recent studies, for example, have shown that the 50-meter-diameter asteroid Kamo’oalewa is a piece of lunar basalt. It was probably ejected into space between 1 and 10 million years ago during the formation of Giordano Bruno Crater. It is also known that the spectra of near-Earth asteroids 2020 CD3 and 2024 PT5 are very similar to the monthly spectra.
Are most near-Earth asteroids pieces of the Moon?
All of this has prompted researchers to take a closer look at Earth’s gravitationally bound bodies. It’s actually quite a fuzzy concept. It includes real mini-moons, quasi-satellites that really orbit the Sun but regularly approach the Earth, and a bunch of other objects.
Traditionally, most of these bodies were thought to be asteroids that came to us from the Main Belt. However, a new study challenges those claims. According to it, anything that breaks off from the Moon continues to fly no farther than three radii of “Earth Hill” from us. The latter term refers to the zone where the Earth’s gravity exceeds the solar gravity.
Of course, eventually some part of all these bodies is lost somewhere in space. However, they still remain near the Earth for millions of years.
According to phys.org
