The Earth Has a Second Moon, And No One Noticed All This While

Researchers have discovered that an object, now dubbed 2020 CD3, has been gravitationally bound to earth for about three years now. And it is only now that we have discovered it. It was on February 19 that astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona spotted a dim object moving quickly across the sky somewhere close to earth. The same object was then observed by researchers at six more observatories around the world who confirmed the presence of what can now be considered a minimoon. The researchers say the new and perhaps temporary minimoon is probably between 1.9 meters and 3.5 metres across, which is around the same size as a mid-size car.

Astronomers say that the new minimoon orbit isn’t stable, and the 2020 CD3 could eventually catapult itself away from Earth. “It is heading away from the Earth-moon system as we speak,” says Grigori Fedorets at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK, told the New Scientist. Incidentally, this isn’t the first-time earth has had an additional moon, albeit temporarily. In 2006, the 2006 RH120 remained within the earth’s gravitational pull between September 2006 and June 2007 before it managed to wriggle free. Chances are, this minimoon will too.

Supermassive Black Hole Image Captured For First Time

The black hole image shows the boundary between light and dark around a black hole, called the event horizon - the point of no return, where the gravity of the black hole becomes so extreme that nothing that enters can ever escape.

Astronomers Find The 'Impossible': A Galaxy Without Dark Matter

Stupefied astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the first and only known galaxy without dark matter, the invisible and poorly-understood substance thought to make up a quarter of the Universe. The discovery could revise or even upend theories of how galaxies are formed, they reported in the journal Nature. "This is really bizarre," said co-author Roberto Abraham, an astronomer at the University of Toronto. "For a galaxy this size, it should have 30 times as much dark matter as regular matter," he told AFP by phone. "What we found is that there is no dark matter at all." "That shouldn't be possible," he added. There are 200 billion observable galaxies, perhaps more, astronomers estimate.

Astronomers Detect Signal Of Universe's First Stars

The observation came after a decade-long quest, years earlier than expected, and was described by one excited observer as the biggest astronomical breakthrough since the Nobel-capped detection of gravitational waves in 2015.