Scientists Confirm New Moon in Solar System

Leaving a wobbly track through 🚀Space, a tiny mini-moon orbits the Sun, coming relatively close to Earth along its path.

Intrigued by this scrap of rock, which is about 164 feet across, scientists have been trying to figure out how the little moonlet got there. They have decided it is nothing more than a chip off the old block.

The moonlet bears a grand name — Kamo’oalewa, which is a Hawaiian word that roughly translates to “the oscillating celestial fragment,” according to Live Science.

Good luck trying to find it, because on its closest approach to Earth it is about 40 times farther than the 239,000 mile distance that separates us from the moon, and its orbit can take it as far as 100 times farther, according to Time.

The chunk of 🚀Space rock’s orbit gets warped by the competing gravitational pulls of the sun and Earth.

“It’s primarily influenced just by the sun’s gravity, but this pattern shows up because it’s also — but not quite — on an Earth-like orbit. So it’s this sort of odd dance,” said graduate student Ben Sharkey of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of