Earth's quasi-Moon, Asteroid Day

Today is June 30, 2024 and this date is precisely the international asteroid day that is celebrated in commemoration of what happened in Tunguska, on June 30, 1908 and also to raise awareness about the problem of asteroids and also the potential it has in the future to obtain resources to advance our development as a civilization.

The earth needs a defense plan against asteroids because at any moment a scare can happen, a scare that can destroy an entire city and it is not a joke, it happened in the past and will happen in the future, there is no indication of Although asteroids have stopped falling, they continue to fall just as they have for millions of years.

The only problem is that now we are humans and we are no longer the million or 2 million humans that there were in ancient times, now we are 8000 million humans with cities of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers together, there are cities of thousands of kilometers squares, the largest urban area is Tokyo, but there is also Mexico, which is enormous, and Buenos Aires, which is also gigantic.

All this is fascinating, and the following is somewhat surprising, a contest has been organized to give an official name, an official name, recognized by the International Astronomical Union, to give a name to an asteroid, but not just any asteroid but a pseudo moon of The Earth, specifically 2004 GU9, is about 200 m in diameter and accompanies our planet in an orbit that makes it a quasi-Moon.

This contest will take place in three stages, the first from June to September, to receive name proposals, if your name is chosen in the end, it will be the name that Moon will have, officially for all astronomers in the world, I am not very Surely in this case the International Astronomical Union wants to take a chance by naming a quasi-moon after a specific living person.

This is not a normal asteroid, it is a quite notable asteroid, it is a quasi-moon of the Earth and it is not the only one, there are three or four others.

Another interesting note that has occurred these days is that it has published the first analyzes of the samples brought from the asteroid Bennu, which is about 262 m in diameter, and the first surprise, one of the samples, the first surprise is that dust rich in carbon, nitrogen, organic compounds and all these elements are essential components for life as we know it. Curiously, there are clay minerals that are particularly serpentine.

The sample is a type of rock or mineral that is found for example in the oceanic ridges of the Earth. Magnesium and sodium phosphate was also found, which suggests that the asteroid may have belonged to be part of an ancient oceanic world, Because they are minerals that can only form in the presence of liquid water, not water ice but liquid water, it is not the first time that this type of minerals associated with liquid water has been found on an asteroid.

The Japanese found a similar phosphate in 2020 in the sample from the Ryugu asteroid that was brought to Earth by the Jasa mission Hayabusa 2, which is the Japanese space agency, a world with water in the past of the solar system, it would be tempting to think about something like the earth, but most likely it would be something similar to the moons Enceladus or the moon Europa; worlds with an icy surface under which there was an ocean of water and also worlds that should be many.

Keep in mind that when the solar system was formed, many protoplanets were formed, small worlds of about 1000 to 2000 km in diameter, many of them could have that icy crust, they are in more or less cold areas but maintain heat inside and with They had liquid water under that frozen crust. The interesting thing is that in addition to having that liquid water, those oceans of water beneath that frozen crust also had the essential elements to form life, they were like cosmic eggs of life.

Can you imagine that life could have formed in one of them and that it ended up destroyed and that life ended up reaching Earth in some way through the asteroids, is one of the possibilities they propose.

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