The origin of Kamo’oalewa
And according to a new study in Nature, we may at last know how it was formed.
The moon’s been getting bombarded by space rocks for billions of years, resulting in all manner of lunar debris getting ejected into space (nearly 500 bits of which have made it to the surface of the Earth as meteorites). Kamo’oalewa is one such piece of lunar rubble that spiraled away from the moon.
But rather than landing on Earth or simply tumbling off into the void, it found itself a quasi-satellite in its own right.
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