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A group of Hungarian scientists confirmed that the Earth had not only one moon, but three, although the two "newer" ones are entirely made of dust. This discovery is the confirmation of a work that goes back several decades, in the early 1960s, when clouds were spotted for the first time. Research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society indicates that new moons are made up entirely of very small dust particles with a diameter of less than one millimeter and reflect the light rather dimly.
That's why they were hard to observe and study even though they were about the same distance from the Earth as the Moon – 400,000 kilometers.
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"It's very difficult to detect clouds against galactic light, starlight, zodiacal light, and sky radiation," Gabor Horvath, a physicist at the university, told the media. Eotvos Lorand.
The search team captured snapshots of mysterious clouds that are hiding just 4.02 336 km away, which is almost the same distance as the moon, they said in the monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In 1961, a Polish scientist, Kazimierz Kordylewski, observed these moons for the first time and later named them as Kordylewski Dust Clouds (KDC). But their existence has been questioned by astronomers over the past six decades.
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Kordylewski had discovered the dust clouds near a special point in the space called L5, which is a Lagrange point of the Earth-Moon gravitational system. The Lagrange points are places of equilibrium in space where the gravitational forces of two large and solid astronomical objects such as Earth and Moon cancel the centrifugal forces.
(With agency entries)
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