May Have Spotted Astronomers One of Earth's Ghostly Dust Moons

A ghostly dust satellite or two might be orbiting the Earth, according to a new research building we have a 60-year-old idea.

Massive objects attract one another through the force of gravity. But when you have multiple huge objects with just the right masses, their mutual gravitational field can introduce some anomalies-like gravitational points that can hold things stable. Scientists have found objects orbiting in these "Lagrange points" created by the combined gravity of the Sun and Mars, the Sun and Neptune, and the Sun and Jupiter. Researchers are now reporting evidence of dust clouds, called Kordylewski dust clouds, in the Lagrange points created by the Earth and the Moon.

Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler predicted the first three Lagrange points in these kinds of systems in 1767, and Italian astronomer-mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange predicted two more points back in 1772. Today, scientists know all about-NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will orbit the Sun and Earth in a stable Lagrange point called L2.

The Earth and Moon has the right to such a ratio of L4 and L5, the two Lagrange points actually discovered by Lagrange himself. Polish scientist Kazimierz Kordylewski L5 in 1961. Since then, there has been a lot of research. But in the past two months, the teams of scientists have taken a look at these clouds, but they still exist, despite the additional gravity of the Sun or its solar winds.

The team from Eötvös Loránd University began by building a mathematical simulation, based on the equations of a system containing the Sun, Earth, Moon, and a fourth dust cloud. They found that a swirling, ever-changing dust cloud was totally possible at L5, according to the first of two papers in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This confirmed another analysis from a Russian team published a month before.

But would they actually see a cloud Kordylewski? The team set out with study author Judit Slíz-Balogh's private observatory in Badacsonytördemic, Hungary, with special lenses that could measure the polarization of the light-essentially, the orientation of the corresponding electric field as it travels through space. They hoped that they would be able to see the Kordylewski dust cloud's signature on the polarization of light coming from L5.

They found it, but not without effort. "After several-months of perseverance (because it is hard to find moonless and cloudless good nights in Hungary) we succeeded in catching the [Kordylewski dust cloud] They wrote in the second paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Though the team is still working on it, it's still worth treating their conclusion with a grain of salt. According to the paper, their observations may be a transient phenomena, and they may be more easily blown away by gravitational or other planets or solar wind. Plenty of other telescopes, as well as a Japanese probe, have not found evidence for the dust-though other observations have. Maybe it's something else, though the searchers did not know the source of this polarized light. The researchers argue that their polarization-observing method is better.

So, is the cloud really there? The newest evidence points to yes-it's really there, if not two, ghost moons, with another possible dust cloud at L4. Spoooooky!