Earth's new quasi-satellite

Brian G Turner

Brian G Turner

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If we had two actual moons, life here on earth would be alot more difficult . We'd have have some pretty high ocean tides and likely more earthquakes .
 
Ray McCarthy said:
It depends on distance and mass. Mars has two moons. Though one is likely to crash into the planet, eventually. I think our moon is slowly getting further away?
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The moon is moving away form Earth , I'm not sure by how much.
 
About 4 centimetres a year, so it'll be a while yet... Interesting consequence of that is that it is happening by the gravitational forces transferring some of the Earth's rotational energy to the moon and consequently the Earth's spin is also slowing a little.

Re two moons if both were of significant mass and proximity but different periods of rotation then, when both moons are in conjunction, we would indeed get some big tides. However I think it a very unlikely scenario. Our moon is not the largest moon in the solar system but it's not far off and it is by far the largest relative to the size of planet being orbited. Which suggests that such a large relative size for a moon is going to be generally less common. I suspect that Earth sized planets are generally too small to capture significant sized moons.

Edit: another thought; that might not be the case in a system with few or no gas giants (not sure how likely that is either) but if that were the case then without big gas giants around to capture the larger bodies as moons maybe high relative sized moons might be more likely?
 
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I read that one yesterday somewhere under the title "Meet the Earth's Second Moon!", or something along those lines.

Another day, another completely misleading piece of journalism misrepresenting and distorting a scientific fact. :/
 
BAYLOR said:
The moon is moving away form Earth , I'm not sure by how much.
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They've been estranged for years. It's so sad how many partnerships end this way. Newtonian divorce rates are ridiculously high. I suspect Algol will be next for the Interstellar Courts following the legal precedent that Alpha Centauri A & B set 93 million years ago :(

pH
 
Phyrebrat said:
They've been estranged for years. It's so sad how many partnerships end this way. Newtonian divorce rates are ridiculously high. I suspect Algol will be next for the Interstellar Courts following the legal precedent that Alpha Centauri A & B set 93 million years ago :(

pH
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Damned opportunistic divorce lawyer must be behind all this. :mad:
 
There's a fair few quasi-satellites. The difference between them and a regular moon is they simply happen to share a similar orbit to Earth around the sun rather than actually orbit the Earth. 2016 HO3 (the one referred to in the article) is supposedly the most constant companion, leapfrogging between 38 and 100 times lunar radius.

On some Mars mission road maps, they are intended to be an interim target for manned exploration via the Orion MPCV spacecraft. (Including one ambitious plan to actually bring one closer to Earth for use as the basis for a space station - tenchnically, it's quite feasible... politically, I guess it'll depend on how many of the decision makers have watched Armegeddon :) ).
 
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