Earth’s Temporary Moon

Earth has acquired a temporary moon. It has been tagging along with us for about 60 years and will continue to tag along until 2083. It is a small asteroid going by the name 2025 PN7.

Officially discovered by the University of Hawaii and confirmed this past week, it is what’s known as a “quasi-moon”—a rare celestial companion that travels almost exactly in sync with Earth. It’s not a true moon because it doesn’t orbit around the Earth. Right now, it is orbiting the sun, keeping pace with us so that it appears to shadow our planet.

2025 PN7 is estimated to be 18 to 36 meters wide, about the height of a small building, which is tiny by cosmic standards. That may be why it took so long to notice it.

Our real moon is held tight by gravity, but this asteroid isn’t bound to us. Think of it as a friendly jogger matching our stride on the same track—close enough to notice but never touching.

After 2083—if its current orbit holds that long—it will drift away into open space. At its closest approach to us, it gets within 4 million kilometers, which is roughly ten times the distance between Earth and the moon. At its most distant, it can swing out to 17 million kilometers. That changing distance is because of the competing gravity of the sun and various planets.

So far, astronomers have confirmed only eight quasi-moons. Each of them is a small but valuable clue in understanding how asteroids move and how Earth’s gravity shapes the space around us. These objects are more than curiosities. They help refine orbital models, improve predictions for near-Earth asteroids, and could serve as testing grounds for future missions. After all, they’re close, relatively stable, and reachable without traveling too far from home.

2025 PN7 will never outshine our real moon. But it’s there and worth knowing about.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/nasa-confirms-earth-now-has-two-moons-until-2083/ar-AA1OQpRt?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=68f6da61133a4c1f869a4eb40f801f5c&ei=63

 

How Life on Earth Could Have Started

Scientists redid an experiment and found a new possibility of how life on Earth could have started.

In the 1931 movie “Frankenstein,” Dr Henry Frankenstein howled his triumph as massive bolts of lightning crackled and Frankenstein’s monster stirred on a laboratory table, its pieced-together corpse brought to life by the power of electricity.

Electrical energy may have also sparked the beginnings of life on Earth billions of years ago. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and the oldest direct fossil evidence of ancient life is stromatolites, microscopic organism preserved in layers known as microbial mats. These are about 3.5 billion years old. However, some scientists suspect life originated even earlier, emerging from accumulated organic molecules in bodies of water, a mixture sometimes referred to as primordial soup.

But where did that organic material come from? Decades ago, researchers proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in the oceans, and spontaneously produced organic molecules.

New research suggests that fizzes of barely visible “microlightning,” generated between charged droplets of water mist, could have cooked up amino acids from inorganic materials. Amino acids are life’s most basic building blocks and would have been the first step forward in the evolution of life.

For amino acids to form, they needed nitrogen atoms that could bond with carbon. Freeing up atoms from nitrogen gas requires severing powerful molecular bonds and takes an enormous amount of energy. Even microlightning has enough energy to break molecular bonds.

In 1953, chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey combined ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water inside a glass sphere to mimic the atmosphere of ancient Earth. They then jolted that atmosphere with electricity, producing simple amino acids. This experiment supported the theory that life could emerge from nonliving molecules.

Scientists revisited the 1953 experiment but directed their attention toward electrical activity on a smaller scale. They looked at electricity exchanged between water droplets measuring between 1 micron and 20 microns in diameter. (The width of a human hair is 100 microns.) The big droplets were positively charged. The little droplets were negatively charged. When oppositely charged droplets are close together, electrons can jump from the negative charge to the positively charged.

The researchers mixed ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen in a glass bulb, then sprayed the gases with water mist. A high-speed camera captured faint flashes of microlightning in the vapor. When they examined the bulb’s contents, they found organic molecules, including the amino acid glycine and uracil, a nucleotide base in RNA.

For the first time, scientists have seen that little droplets of water emit light and a spark. And that spark causes all types of chemical transformations.

Lightning is a dramatic display of electrical power, but it sporadic and unpredictable. Lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in quantities sufficient for life. Water spray, however, would have been more common than lightning. It is more likely that mist-generated microlightning constantly zapped amino acids into existence from pools and puddles, where the molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules.

However, questions remain about life’s origins. An alternative abiogenesis hypothesis proposes that Earth’s first amino acids were cooked up around hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Yet another hypothesis suggests that organic molecules didn’t originate on Earth at all. Rather, they formed in space and were carried here by comets or fragments of asteroids, a process known as panspermia.

What do you think is a likely explanation?

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-redid-an-experiment-that-showed-how-life-on-earth-could-have-started-they-found-a-new-possibility/ar-AA1BPYjK?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=55f7946bb40046bca0f5c028e2b5ca06&ei=38

What Size Is It?

Astronomers have been finding more and more planets outside our home system lately. I find that extremely exciting. But when I'm reading about these discoveries, I'm sometimes left wondering, just how big is this newly-discovered planet?

First, let's understand that because of the distances involved, and the methods currently in place for discovering planets, it takes a big planet to be noticed. I don't find that disappointing, because within our own system, we have 4 big planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus), an equal number of smaller planets, and a scattering of dwarf planets. So just because they haven't found lots of Mars- or Venus-sized planets circling other stars, doesn't mean they aren't there.

So, they are finding big planets, but they've developed a short of short-hand lingo to indicate a few tidbits of information just in what they call a new discovery. I recently read an article in Astronomy magazine that briefly explained what this lingo meant.

A Super-Earth sounds exciting, doesn't it? A planet like Earth! Well, up to a point. They are rocky planets like Earth, but remember that they are mostly finding big planets. A Super-Earth can range in size up to 10 times the Earth's mass. That means a lot of gravity, and I don't think we'd be colonizing that size a planet. But they are a rocky planet! Our system is not the only place where rocky planets exist. In fact, these may be the most common type of planet in our galaxy.

Then there are Mini-Neptunes. These ice giants range in size from 14.5 to 17 times the mass of Earth. (Neptune weighs in at 17 times Earth's mass.) These are also pretty common around other stars.

Which brings us to the 'Jupiter' class of planet, which come in 2 types.

A Hot Jupiter is a gas giant that orbits their star in under 10 days. (I can't name them, but I've heard of some that circle their star in a matter of hours.) A Hot Jupiter usually orbits at around 1/10 the distance between the Earth and the sun, or less. These are not common around stars like ours, occurring in only about 1% of systems having a star similar to ours.

A Cold Jupiter is a gas giant that—like our own Jupiter—lies beyond the ice line, where it's too cold for water to remain a liquid. There was no comment given about how common these might be. I assume Saturn is also a Cold Jupiter.

And then there are Brown Dwarfs, which is a type of star, not a planet. But they don't last long as a star, and then they cool off and they're just a big mass. It's not clear where the dividing line is between massive planets and dead brown dwarfs, but it seems to be somewhere around 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

Got that? Good. The next time you read about a newly-discovered planet, you can figure out a little something about it just by what they call it.