SHOW REPLAY: 2024-10-5 Earth's New, Fleeting "Mini-Moon"

The Other Side of Midnight

Show Page: Alternative Listening: Late last Sunday afternoon (~4:00 PM, EDT, Sept 29), Earth quietly acquired a tiny "second moon" -- a 33-foot-wide bit of "ancient interplanetary flotsam" (according to the NASA observations), orbiting the Sun in a very sparsely-populated "mini-asteroid belt" -- the Arjunas -- that, for some time, have been known to co-exist at Earth's average distance from the Sun. This was only the latest of a series of "temporarily captured Arjuna objects" which, because of the constantly shifting gravity fields of three vastly larger solar system objects -- Earth, the Moon and Sun -- has now become briefly trapped in a grand looping "horse-shoe shaped" partial orbit of the Earth. According to NASA's calculations, after 56 days -- from September 29 to November 25 -- those gravity fields that originally captured it ... will quietly release it-- Back into a slightly modified version of its original solar orbit ... until its NEXT predicted terrestrial encounter-- In 2055. NASA's designation for this tiny visitor is "2024 PT5" (it's so small and "unimportant," that it doesn't even rate a formal name ...). Yet, in these times of extraordinary Change, as one might expect, the Internet has been "all atwitter" with the usual speculations: is this visitor truly "only a natural hunk of interplanetary rock" ... or, could it be-- Something MUCH, MUCH more .... Join us tonight ... and you'll find out, 'cause ... we have NEW DATA! Richard C. Hoagland