An X (Twitter) thread has been widely-shared over the weekend, in which Radiolab host Latif Nasser explained how he investigated the mystery of a moon labeled “Zoozve” on his 2-year-old’s astronomy poster.
Having noticed the label, he of course Googled it, and found the
Further Googling found no references to any “Zoozve”, and a friend at NASA had no idea what it was referring to either. Nasser called the illustrator, who swore that he took the name from a list of moons of the Solar System.
To cut a long (but enjoyable!) story short, Nasser’s NASA friend (
“The provisional designation includes the year of its discovery followed by two letters that give the order of its discovery during that year. Objects, discovered between 1 and 15 January, are designated in order of their discovery, AA, AB, AC, and so on. Those discovered between 16 and 31 January are given the letters BA, BB, BC, and so on,” the
The object is a lot more interesting than your standard space rocks, being as it was the first of its kind ever discovered, due to its unusual orbit.
“Like all asteroids, its orbit takes it around the Sun, with asteroids closer to the Sun circling more rapidly and completing a ‘year’ in a shorter time. The ‘year’ for VE68 is shorter than the Earth year, clocking in at a little under 225 days,” the Tuorla Observatory explained in a
“This is almost exactly the same as the ‘year’ of the planet Venus – and it turns out that like synchronised divers in the olympic games, both VE68 and Venus are travelling around the Sun nearly in lock-step.”
Tracking the orbit of 2002 VE, they had discovered the first quasi-moon, or quasi-satellites, in the Solar System. Quasi-moons, as the name suggests, are not quite moons. They orbit the Sun, but are also influenced by the planets along their path.
Since the discovery of 2002 VE, other quasi-moons have been discovered. Though these moons can
2002 VE has been orbiting the Sun and encountering Venus for quite a while, but the team who first described its orbit think it may have come from elsewhere.
“Our computations show that it has been in its present orbital state for about seven millennia and will stay there for five more centuries to come,” the team wrote in their
A later paper, when more observations had been carried out, found possible close encounters with Earth, as well as a very complicated orbital path.
“We find that 2002 VE68 will remain as a quasi-satellite of Venus for about 500 yr more and its dynamical evolution is controlled not only by the Earth, with a non-negligible contribution from the Moon, but by Mercury as well,” the
[H/T: