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A Canadian amateur astronomer, Bill Yeung, may have discovered the Earth's second Moon, reported Duncan Steele, astronomer at Salford University, to the British Association for the Advancement of Science Festival in Leicester last night. Yeung is an asteroid hunter and has already a string of discoveries after his name, however, this time he may have found something very unusual. The object is at present simply known by its preliminary designation as J002E3 and circles the Earth every 49.5 days on a path that takes it from 300,000, within the Moon's orbit, to 840,000 km from Earth. Its path around our planet is inclined at 21 degrees from the plane in which the Earth circles the Sun.
Based on the amount of light J002E3 reflects it may be as much as 50m in size, however, there is a chance that it is not an asteroid at all but an old rocket that has managed to escape from close to the Earth. Paul Chados, of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Guardian that he thinks, if J002E3 is an asteroid, that it could have been captured by the Earth relatively recently by wandering into the Earth's Lagrange point where the Sun's and Earth's gravity cancel each other out. Whatever it is J002E3 could not remain on its present path for more than a few hundreds to thousands of years and would probably have been seen before if it had been present for long.
If further observations confirm that J002E3 is an asteroid in orbit around the Earth, rather than artifical space debris, it would be renamed S/2002E1, where the S stands for satellite and E1 stands for the first Earth moon discovered in 2002. If this does happen it is interesting to ponder whether we should rename our own familiar natural satellite "the Big Moon" to distinguish it from its much smaller cousin.
More info: The British Association for the Advancement of Sci
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