Simulations carried out by an international team of astronomers indicate that the asteroid Kamo’oalewa, the most famous of Earth’s quasi-satellites, comes from the lunar crater Giordano Bruno.
The new research, led by Yifei Jiao of Tsinghua University in Beijing and published in Nature Astronomy, shows that this peculiar celestial body must be the remains of an impact that formed a lunar crater with a diameter of 10 to 20 kilometers a few million years ago. years. Ultimately, all the data pointed to the lunar crater Giordano Bruno, which lies just behind the visible part of the lunar surface at the back of the Earth satellite.
Kamo’oalewa is one of fewer than a dozen known quasi-satellites on Earth. The asteroid, which measures about 50 meters in diameter, orbits the Sun in an orbit very similar to that of the Earth. This makes the celestial body extremely difficult to observe.
The asteroid was not discovered until 2016 using technology from the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii. However, the object did not achieve some fame until five years later, when a research team at the University of Arizona discovered that Kamo’oalewa probably came from the moon.
The hypothesis about the origin of Kamo’oalewa can be tested when the Chinese Tianwen-2 probe brings samples of the asteroid to Earth. The mission, originally prepared under the name ZhengHe, is scheduled to begin next year.
Yifei Jiao’s team has determined that the impact that created the Giordano Bruno crater could have ejected large enough fragments into heliocentric orbits, some of which could be transferred to Earth’s resonance and persist today.
