After much speculation, research and confirmation, it is official: NASA scientists have announced that the Earth has a second moon, known as Asteroid 2016 H03, that has been orbiting the planet for around a century.

The wee asteroid is just a few hundred feet across and was detected earlier this year from a survey telescope in Hawaii. It follows an orbital pattern taking it on slow long loops. No one is quite sure how long the body will stay in our vicinity, but gravitational forces seem intent on keeping it around, at least for a while.

Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains that because of its distance, this object is “quasi-satellite” of Earth. “Its loops drift a little ahead or behind from year to year, but when they drift too far forward or backward, Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to reverse the drift and hold onto the asteroid so that it never wanders farther away than about 100 times the distance of the moon. The same effect also prevents the asteroid from approaching much closer than about 38 times the distance of the moon. In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth.”

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Many planetary fans were disappointed when Pluto was downgraded to the status of “dwarf planet,” but a recent discovery shows there was another and much more mysterious ninth planet waiting in the wings all along, dubbed, for now, simply: Planet X.

“During the solar system’s infancy 4.5 billion years ago,” say astronomers, “the giant planet was knocked out of the planet-forming region near the sun. Slowed down by gas, the planet settled into a distant elliptical orbit, where it still lurks today.”

Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena put forward strong evidence for the existence of this yet-unseen planet, which had been posited previously but insufficiently supported by facts (like gravitational effects and other byproducts of its periodic passing). On curious byproduct of the discovery is that the solar system is much bigger than we imagine, stretched out by the wide-ranging orbit of this last piece of the Sol planetary puzzle.

“Batygin and Brown inferred its presence from the peculiar clustering of six previously known objects that orbit beyond Neptune. They say there’s only a 0.007% chance, or about one in 15,000, that the clustering could be a coincidence. Instead, they say, a planet with the mass of 10 Earths has shepherded the six objects into their strange elliptical orbits, tilted out of the plane of the solar system.” Meanwhile, astronomers are tilting their telescopes to try and catch a peek of this mystery planet, and some will no doubt remain skeptical until they can see it with their own eyes.

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Scientists have spotted a rare and cosmic event happening 3.5 billion light years from Earth: the impending collision of a pair of black holes, each spiraling in slowly around the other.

Astronomers at Caltech identified a cosmic event, confirmed by researchers Columbia University, and while no one is certain how things will play out, it is estimated that the collision will release destructive gravitational waves through space-time with power equivalent to 1,000,000 supernovas.

Black holes are extremely dense objects whose gravitational pulls are so great that not even light can escape. Most galaxies seem to have a supermassive black hole, which can be problematic when galaxies merge. Two supermassive black holes usually enter into orbit with each other, until they interact with other celestial objects, like interstellar gas. As more research is done on this real unfolding example, there is a vast range of potential new knowledge to be gained from such an unusual cosmic collision.

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Space debris has been a growing problem for decades as every space mission leaves at least a few pieces of trash behind. As a result of this junk being left in orbit, there is now an increasingly alarming amount of potentially dangerous stuff in the Earth’s orbit. The Swiss Space Center plans to take out the trash with a helpful satellite called CleanSpace One.

Space junk is such a serious concern because an impact with even a teeny-tiny piece of detritus could spell disaster for passing spacecraft or satellites. This, in turn, would make even more space junk that would just exacerbate the problem.

However, CleanSpace One has a challenging job ahead of it. When it gets a lock on a piece of space debris, it has to match its orbit to that of the junk. Not surprisingly, this isn’t super-easy to do. The “janitor” satellite then has to grab and lock onto the junk and drag it down into the Earth’s atmosphere, where both the junk and the satellite will burn up upon re-entry.

The Swiss Space Center has plans that stretch far beyond their first clean-up satellite. They want to become the leaders in the field of space cleaning. The satellites won’t come cheap, but they could eventually save untold millions of dollars by keeping potentially devastating junk out of future spacecrafts’ way. The predicted launch date for the program is somewhere around 2017-2018.

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