The Mystery of Asteroid Kamo'oalewa: Why It's Not from the Moon ⚡ экспресс
Original: "Origin of asteroid (469219) Kamo`oalewa: the main asteroid belt or the Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon?"
Asteroid Kamo'oalewa most likely comes from the main asteroid belt, not the Moon.
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For a long time, asteroid Kamo'oalewa was thought to be a piece of the Moon — its spectrum looks just too much like lunar soil. But new calculations show there are dozens of times more objects from the asteroid belt with such orbits. So it's most likely an ordinary cosmic wanderer, not a child of Selene. Tianwen-2 will check.
🎯 Kamo'oalewa spans 40 to 100 meters — about as large as a few football fields — but through a telescope, it appears only as a faint point of magnitude 22. To spot it, you need equipment that captures light tens of times dimmer than what the eye can see.