Author: jlamprecht

[I've known about neutrinos for a very long time. They are totally amazing and weird. And they are passing through your body all the time. Even more bizarre, neutrinos pass through the ENTIRE EARTH. Neutrinos can come at you from above, but also from BELOW! Yes, they can pass through the entire Earth and come out the other side!! As always, these are wonderful European Race discoveries. Jan]

Neutrino map of the galaxy is 1st view of the Milky Way in ‘anything other than light’

By Ben Turner
published 4 days ago

Scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have used 60,000 neutrinos to create the first map of the Milky Way made with matter and not light.

Scientists have traced the galactic origins of thousands of "ghost particles" known as neutrinos to create the first-ever portrait of the Milky Way made from matter and not light — and it’s given them a brand-new way to study the universe.

The groundbreaking image was snapped by capturing the neutrinos as they fell through the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a gigantic detector buried deep inside the South Pole’s ice.

Neutrinos earn their spooky nickname because their nonexistent electrical charge and almost-zero mass mean they barely interact with other types of matter. As such, neutrinos fly straight through regular matter at close to the speed of light.

Yet by slowing these neutrinos, physicists have finally traced the particles’ origins billions of light-years away to ancient, cataclysmic stellar explosions and cosmic-ray collisions. The researchers published their findings June 29 in the journal Science.

"The capabilities provided by the highly sensitive IceCube detector, coupled with new data analysis tools, have given us an entirely new view of our galaxy — one that had only been hinted at before," Denise Caldwell, director of the National Science Foundation’s physics division, which funded the research, said in a statement. "As these capabilities continue to be refined, we can look forward to watching this picture emerge with ever-increasing resolution, potentially revealing hidden features of our galaxy never before seen by humanity."

Every second, about 100 billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body. The tiny particles are everywhere — produced in the nuclear fire of stars, in enormous supernova explosions, by cosmic rays and radioactive decay, and in particle accelerators and nuclear reactors on Earth. In fact, neutrinos, which were first discovered zipping out of a nuclear reactor in 1956, are second only to photons as the most abundant subatomic particles in the universe.

Despite their ubiquity, the chargeless and near-massless particles’ minimal interactions with other matter make neutrinos incredibly difficult to detect. Many famous neutrino-detection experiments have spotted the steady bombardment of neutrinos sent to us from the sun, but this cascade also masks neutrinos from more unusual sources, such as gigantic star explosions called supernovas and particle showers produced by cosmic rays.

To capture the neutrinos, particle physicists turned to IceCube, located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The gigantic detector consists of more than 5,000 optical sensors beaded across 86 strings that dangle into holes drilled up to 1.56 miles (2.5 kilometers) into the Antarctic ice.

While many neutrinos pass completely unimpeded through the Earth, they do occasionally interact with water molecules, creating particle byproducts called muons that can be witnessed as flashes of light inside the detector’s sensors. From the patterns these flashes make, scientists can reconstruct the energy, and sometimes the sources, of the neutrinos.

Finding a neutrino’s starting point depends on how clear its direction is recorded in the detector; some have very obvious initial directions, whereas others produce cascading "fuzz balls of light" that obscure their origins, lead author Naoko Kurahashi Neilson, a physicist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said in the statement.

By feeding more than 60,000 detected neutrino cascades collected over 10 years into a machine-learning algorithm, the physicists built up a stunning picture: an ethereal, blue-tinged image showing the neutrinos’ sources all across our galaxy.

The map showed that the neutrinos were being overwhelmingly produced in regions with previously detected high gamma-ray counts, confirming past suspicions that many ghost particles are summoned as byproducts of cosmic rays smashing into interstellar gas. It also left the physicists awestruck.

"I remember saying, ‘At this point in human history, we’re the first ones to see our galaxy in anything other than light,’" Neilson said.

Just like previous revolutionary advances such as radio astronomy, infrared astronomy and gravitational wave detection, neutrino mapping has given us a completely new way to peer out into the universe. Now, it’s time to see what we find.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/particle-physics/ghost-particle-image-is-the-1st-view-of-our-galaxy-in-anything-other-than-light?utm_term=23709803-D360-4259-9C73-BE4FF46B5C71&utm_campaign=368B3745-DDE0-4A69-A2E8-62503D85375D&utm_medium=email&utm_content=2D5C159E-DF3C-4887-B039-4BED38DE05F5&utm_source=SmartBrief

[There are images and even a video at the source link below. Jan]

A runaway supermassive black hole ejected from its own galaxy, possibly in a tussle with two other black holes, is being trailed by a 200,000 light-year-long chain of infant stars, a new study reports.

The incredible sight, which is like nothing astronomers have spotted before, was identified by the Hubble Space Telescope in a happy accident.

The supermassive black hole, with a mass equivalent to 20 million suns, is traveling so fast that it would cover the distance between Earth and the moon in just 14 minutes.

An illustration of a runaway black hole ejected from its host galaxy and followed by a trail of infant stars.
An illustration of a runaway black hole ejected from its host galaxy and followed by a trail of infant stars. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))

As it travels, the cosmic runaway is piling up gas in front of it. When dense regions of gas like those left in the wake of this rogue black hole collapse, new stars are born. A supermassive black hole cruising through clouds of gas would normally feed on it, a process called accretion. But this runaway cosmic monster is moving too fast to grab a bite.

As a result, the rogue black hole is actively creating a corridor of infant stars, and these are forming a tail that tracks right back to the supermassive black hole’s galaxy of origin, researchers said. And this tail is half as bright as that galaxy, meaning it must be absolutely brimming with stars.

"We think we’re seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we’re looking at star formation trailing the black hole," study lead author Pieter van Dokkum, of Yale University, said in a statement. "What we’re seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship, we’re seeing the wake behind the black hole. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before."

At the outermost tip of the column of stars in a knot of ionized oxygen that is incredibly bright. The team believes that this is the result of the black hole striking gas, shocking it and heating it.

"Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very-high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas," said van Dokkum. "How it works exactly is not really known."

Something else that isn’t totally clear yet is how the supermassive black hole came to be launched out of its host galaxy.
Click here for more Space.com videos…
Kicked out by a cosmic cuckoo

The team thinks that the ejected black hole could have escaped its host galaxy as the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes, the first occurring when two galaxies merged 50 million years ago, bringing two cosmic titans close together.

As these supermassive black holes circled around each other, another galaxy entered the mix, carrying with it another supermassive black hole. Following the old adage "two’s company and three’s a crowd," the interaction between the three black holes was chaotic and led to one black hole stealing momentum from the others and hurtling off into space.

That means there’s a good chance that the interloper black hole introduced itself to the system and eventually replaced one of the original black holes, like a cosmic cuckoo.

As the runaway black hole blasted away from its former companions, the new pairing would have moved in the opposite direction. And there are hints at a runaway black-hole binary on the opposite side of the host galaxy to the black hole racing through space with its stellar tail.

The next step for this research will be to search for evidence of these binary black holes with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, study team members aid.
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Scientists will be hoping for the same good fortune experienced by van Dokkum and his team when they initially made the extraordinary observation of this massive cosmic runaway.

"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum concluded. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image, and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, ‘Oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.’ When we eliminated cosmic rays, we realized it was still there."

The team’s research was published on April 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Source: https://www.space.com/runaway-supermassive-black-hole-hubble-telescope?utm_term=AF536F6D-055D-443A-91F7-FD448D0CCA73&utm_campaign=58E4DE65-C57F-4CD3-9

[Just read this and be amazed at what this British technology can do. It's just insane! But as always, Western Civilization does the impossible. This is very important because near Earth space is getting filled with tiny pieces of debris that will destroy spacecraft and endanger lives. Jan]

The technology will be able to extrapolate the trajectory of the smallest pieces of space junk.

A new method of tracking tiny pieces of space junk has passed its first demonstration test in orbit, according to its builders ODIN Space of London.

Over the past two years, ODIN has been developing and qualifying technology to detect and track space junk that is too small to register using existing methods. The company’s first demonstration sensor was integrated into the D-Orbit ION satellite, which hitched a ride to orbit as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-8 mission that launched June 12.

Now, after more than a week on orbit, ODIN has confirmed with D-Orbit that their onboard sensor is operational, and picked up faint acoustic vibrations from its host satellite. For this demo flight, ODIN’s debris sensor was set to an exceptionally high sensitivity, to ensure even the smallest of readings from the ION satellite could be detected.

There are tens of thousands of pieces of trackable debris in orbit around Earth, with that number expected to increase exponentially into the 2030s and beyond with the continuing growth of the space economy. Using current technology, only pieces of debris larger than around 4 inches (10 centimeters) are able to be tracked. ODIN hopes its technology will help track sub-centimeter debris, which travel in near invisibility, at bullet speeds, and pose threats to satellites, space stations and other on-orbit infrastructure.

"We’ll now focus on providing our customers with the next generation of space data and sending many more sensors to every orbit," said ODIN CEO and co-founder James New in an ODIN press release, adding, "by understanding how lethal, sub-centimeter debris behaves, we can protect space assets, maximize growth and drive sustainability in space."

Now, ODIN plans to scale up the technology in order to bring the technology to the commercial market. Once operational, ODIN’s sub-centimeter sensor will be able to track the size, location and, for the first time, the speed and trajectory of debris measuring as small as 1/250th of an inch (0.1 millimeters).

With this trajectory mapping, ODIN strives to build complex models of sub-centimeter debris to improve situational awareness for thousands of satellites in Earth orbit.

Source: https://www.space.com/odin-space-completes-debris-tracking-demo?utm_term=AF536F6D-055D-443A-91F7-FD448D0CCA73&utm_campaign=58E4DE65-C57F-4CD3-9A5A-609994E2C5A9&utm_medium=email&utm_content=E5039B48-7782-41C2-91B9-8DC8DA3B43A5&utm_source=SmartBrief

[This German lady scientist is interesting. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-jIplX6Wjw

[There were a LOT of nuclear tests in America, on American soil, mostly in Nevada. There have been all kinds of nuclear tests, in the air, at sea, in space, underground, etc. Scientists, especially American scientists, tested and measured nuclear explosions under every conceivable kind of condition. In the final years, underground nuclear testing was the most common and safe way to do it. Atmospheric tests were the most dangerous because of winds. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCf_yEoLj9o

[This topic is nasty but belongs in the field of human science. I have been following, out of pure curiosity the nightmare problem of the 5 people in the tiny submarine that went down to the Titanic and they are now lost on the sea bed. I had just pondered their fate. I thought at first that the most likely scenario is that maybe the submarine imploded and they all just died. From every angle, human survival in this case is IMPOSSIBLE. I looked at this as done and dusted, these people died. Regardless of what happened, they are DEAD. The thing that piqued my interest was that sonars were picking up tapping noises every 30 minutes which sounded like people trapped in the submarine knocking on it so that they could be found. There are many safety issues with the submarine like: Why didn't they have some cheap transponders on it which send out messages that are easy to find. That, for example, is a very simple, and very effective solution. But, that clearly was not done. The tapping noises were heard yesterday and last night. So it seems as if these people are genuinely alive. The temperature down there is extremely cold. So I thought that between the cold and oxygen deprivation they WILL DIE. There is ZERO HOPE. Then I wondered if some would not die before others? What if some die and others can then continue breathing oxygen? I must say, I had thought that the final outcome of this is that it may take them days, weeks or months, or longer to eventually find the submarine and they'll open it and it will be a forensic coffin and a year or more from now we'll find out how long they lived and when they died. But check out what a doctor and an admiral have to say. This is quite bizarre and it is how the human body adapts! Jan]

It is a claustrophobic, terrifying prospect – being trapped in a 22ft submersible, potentially thousands of feet underwater, with oxygen running out.

The exact whereabouts of the Titanic submersible and the condition of the five crew onboard are unknown. It is thought that, if the vessel is still intact, it may have just a few hours of oxygen remaining, creating a race against time to find the sub before it is too late.

However, that timeline is not necessarily rigid. Dr Ken LeDez, a hyperbaric medicine expert at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, has told BBC News that, depending on conditions, some of those aboard could survive longer than expected.

"It depends on how cold they get and how effective they are at conserving oxygen," he said, adding that shivering will use up a lot of oxygen, while wrapping up in a huddle can help to conserve heat.

He said running out of oxygen is a gradual process. "It’s not like switching off a light, it’s like climbing a mountain – as the temperature gets colder and metabolism falls [it depends] how fast you ascend that mountain," he said.

While admitting that we do not know the full situation inside the submersible, Dr LeDez said conditions could be different person-to-person, and that although it is a "disturbing conversation", some could survive longer than others.

On Wednesday, Rear Admiral John Mauger from the US Coast Guard said there were a number of unknowns in the search and rescue mission.

"We do not know the rate of consumption of oxygen per occupant on the sub," Rear Adm Mauger told the BBC.

Dr LeDez also said that running out of oxygen is not the only danger those on board face.

The vessel may have lost electrical power, which is likely to have a role in controlling the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide inside the vessel.

As the oxygen level falls, the proportion of carbon dioxide being breathed out by the crew will be rising, with potentially fatal consequences.

"As levels of carbon dioxide build up, then it becomes sedative, it becomes like an anaesthetic gas, and you will go to sleep."

Too much of the gas in a person’s bloodstream, known as hypercapnia, can kill them if not treated.

Former Royal Navy submarine captain Ryan Ramsey says he looked at videos online of the inside of Titan and could not see a carbon dioxide removal system, known as scrubbers.

"That for me is the greatest problem of all of them," he says.
line

At the same time, the crew are at risk from hypothermia, where the body gets too cold.

According to Capt Ramsey, if the sub is on the seabed, the water temperature will be about 0C. If it has also lost electricity, it will not be generating any power and therefore cannot generate heat.

But hypothermia "could be their friend", said Dr LeDez.

"There is a possibility if they cool down enough and lose consciousness they could live through it – rescuers know this," he said, adding that the body will automatically try to adapt to survive.

However on the flip side, hypothermia, the lack of oxygen and the build-up of carbon dioxide within the sub mean the crew’s ability to make contact with the search and rescue mission, such as by banging on the hull at regular intervals to try and attract attention, will dwindle.

"If they’re unconscious, they’re not going to be able to do much to help themselves," says Dr LeDez.

While the Coast Guard has warned there is probably little oxygen left, the crew may be able to conserve their supplies – at least for a while.

Mr Ramsey says slowing their breathing would also help but admits this could be difficult considering the stress they would be under.

Dr LeDez says they could also spread out carbon dioxide-absorbing granules or reduce their power use if they still have electricity.

In terms of food and water, the Coast Guard said the crew had some "limited rations" on board but couldn’t say how much.

Despite all these challenges, Dr LeDez urges against cancelling the search-and-rescue operation too soon, saying they might be able to survive even when oxygen levels are very low.

"If anybody can survive in it, you know, it’s these individuals," he says. "It just depends on them having power and depends on them having light to be able to find things and make these controls, but absolutely, they could still be alive."

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65981277

[This makes sense. I did look into the effects of the mass of ice accumulating at the poles in the past, and how that could cause the Earth to tilt. So this is not surprising. We live on a very fragile planet and our biology is very soft. Whites are the only race who can actually help to keep this planet going and who could survive anything. Jan]

Earth’s tilt has changed by 31.5 inches (80 centimeters) between 1993 and 2010 because of the amount of groundwater humans have pumped from the planet’s interior.

In that period, humans removed 2,150 gigatons of water from natural reservoirs in the planet’s crust. If such an amount was poured into the global ocean, its surface would rise by 0.24 inches (6 millimeters). A new study has now revealed that displacing such an enormous amount of water has had an effect on the axis around which the planet spins.

Scientists arrived at this conclusion by modeling the changes in the position of Earth’s rotational pole, the point at which the planet’s imaginary axis would stick out of the surface if it were a physical object. The position of the rotational pole is not identical with the geographical north and south poles and actually changes over time, so the rotational axis cuts through different spots on the planet’s crust at various points in time.

Since 2016, scientists have known that the rotational pole is affected by climate-related processes, such as the thawing of icebergs and the redistribution of the mass of the water locked in them. But until the researchers added the pumped-out water into their models, the results hadn’t perfectly matched observations. Without the pumped-out groundwater, the model was off by 31 inches (78.5 centimeters).

"Earth’s rotational pole actually changes a lot," Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University who led the study, said in a statement. "Our study shows that among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater actually has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole."

Since the tilt of Earth’s axis can have an effect on seasonal weather on the planet’s surface, scientists now wonder whether the shifts of the rotational pole could contribute to climate change in the long-term.

"Observing changes in Earth’s rotational pole is useful for understanding continent-scale water storage variations," Seo said. "Polar motion data are available from as early as the late 19th century. So, we can potentially use those data to understand continental water storage variations during the last 100 years. Were there any hydrological regime changes resulting from the warming climate? Polar motion could hold the answer."

Overall, the Earth’s rotational pole shifts by several meters a year. How much drained groundwater reservoirs contribute to this shift depends on where on the planet they are located. The study showed that water removed from mid-latitudes has the largest effect on the planet’s tilt.

Managing how groundwater moves around the globe could therefore help limit the shifts of the rotational pole and thus the potential climate effects that come with them.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community.

Source: https://www.space.com/earth-tilt-changed-by-groundwater-pumping

[This is the nastiest event that has taken place in a long time. It is the worst thing that has happened on the planet in HUNDREDS of years. It happened in Russia in 1908. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhVvihYJBEs

[What is really interesting in this article is that these scientists studied the growth of CITIES and that cities WILL COLLAPSE! This is something I did not know about. I would otherwise not take this idea too seriously. I have been looking into this topic about life in the universe, and the answer is actually much scarier. As bizarre as it sounds, we might be alone – and that might be a very good thing! I will discuss this later. Jan]

Why has humanity never been visited by aliens (that we know of)? The question has confounded scientists for decades, but two researchers have come up with a possible — and disturbing — explanation: Advanced civilizations could be doomed to either stagnate or die before they get the chance.

The new hypothesis suggests that, as space-faring civilizations grow in scale and technological development, they eventually reach a crisis point where innovation no longer keeps up with the demand for energy. What comes next is collapse. The only alternative path is to reject a model of "unyielding growth" in favor of maintaining equilibrium, but at the cost of a civilization’s ability to expand across the stars, the researchers said.

The argument, published on May 4 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, attempts to find a resolution to the Fermi Paradox. Taking its name from the casual lunchtime musings of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, the paradox draws attention to the contradiction between the immense scope and age of the universe — two things that suggest the universe should be teeming with advanced alien life — and the lack of evidence that extraterrestrials exist anywhere in sight. "So where is everybody?" Fermi is thought to have remarked.

The researchers of the new study say they may have the answer.

"Civilizations either collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritizing homeostasis, a state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal, making them difficult to detect remotely," astrobiologists Michael Wong, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Stuart Bartlett, of the California Institute of Technology, wrote in the study. "Either outcome — homeostatic awakening or civilization collapse — would be consistent with the observed absence of [galactic-wide] civilizations."

The pair came to their hypothesis by researching studies of the "’superlinear"’ growth of cities. These studies suggested that cities increase in size and energy consumption at an exponential rate as their populations grow, inevitably leading to crisis points — or singularities — that cause rapid crashes in growth, followed by an even more precipitous, potentially civilization-ending, collapse.

"We hypothesize that once a planetary civilization transitions into a state that can be described as one virtually connected global city, it will face an ‘asymptotic burnout,’ an ultimate crisis where the singularity-interval time scale becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation," they wrote.

These close-to-collapse civilizations would be the easiest for humanity to detect, the researchers suggest, as they would be dissipating large amounts of energy in a "wildly unsustainable" way. "This presents the possibility that a good many of humanity’s initial detections of extraterrestrial life may be of the intelligent, though not yet wise, kind," the researchers wrote.

To avert their doom, civilizations could undergo a "homeostatic awakening," redirecting their production away from unbounded growth across the stars to one that prioritizes societal wellbeing, sustainable and equitable development and harmony with their environment, the researchers suggest. While such civilizations may not completely abandon space exploration, they would not expand on scales great enough to make contact with Earth likely.

The researchers point to a few of humanity’s "mini-awakenings" that addressed global crises on Earth, such as the reduction of global nuclear arms stockpiles from 70,000 warheads to below 14,000; the halting of the once-growing hole in Earth’s ozone layer by banning chlorofluorocarbon emissions; and the 1982 international whaling moratorium.

The scientists stress, however, that their suggestion is simply a hypothesis, taken from the observation of laws that seem to govern life on Earth, and is designed to "provoke discussion, introspection and future work."

Their proposal joins a bountiful crop of other scientific and popular suggestions as to why we’ve never made direct contact with celestial visitors. These include the numerous practical challenges presented by interstellar travel; that aliens may actually be visiting in secret; or that aliens arrived to Earth too soon (or humans too early) in the life of the universe for direct contact.

Another hypothesis, published April 4 in The Astrophysics Journal, suggests that the sheer scale of the universe means it could take as long as 400,000 years for a signal sent by one advanced species to be received by another — a timescale that’s far greater than the brief period humans have been able to scan the skies.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/alien-civilizations-doomed-to-collapse

[The question is more tricky than you might realise. Jan]

To the naked eye, the night sky reveals only one moon. But how many moons have ever orbited Earth?

How many moons does Earth have? The answer seems obvious: Earth has only one moon. It’s even in the name: the moon. At first, Earth’s moon needed no other name, because for millennia, we didn’t know any other natural satellite existed. But over centuries of astronomy and space exploration, we’ve discovered hundreds of moons in the solar system, and there may be more than you think circling our planet.

"The moon" holds the title of Earth’s only solid, permanent moon, said Gábor Horváth, an astronomer at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. But it’s not the only object to be pulled into Earth’s orbit; a host of near-Earth objects and dust clouds are also caught in Earth’s gravity. These often-temporary satellites technically qualify as minimoons, quasi-satellites or ghost moons.

So the question of how many moons Earth has is more complicated than you might think. The number has changed over time — from zero, to one, to sometimes multiple moons.

Back in Earth’s early days, about 4.5 billion years ago, our planet was moonless. Then, around 4.4 billion years ago, a Mars-size protoplanet called Theia struck Earth. Large chunks of Earth’s crust were catapulted into space. The rocky debris came together — maybe in just a few hours — to form the moon, according to 2022 research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Other "moons" that measure just a few feet across have been far more temporary, captured by Earth’s gravity for short periods before escaping back into space. In 2006, there was the up-to-20-foot-wide (6 meters) asteroid 2006 RH120, a space rock that lingered for 18 months and was the first observed long-term capture of an asteroid into Earth’s orbit. And 2020 CD3, a space rock up to 11.5 feet (3.5 m) across, left Earth’s orbit in March 2020 after spending three years as our mini second moon. In 2020, scientists also spotted SO 2020, a minimoon that drifted back into space in early 2021. Turns out, though, that SO 2020 wasn’t a natural moon; it was the remains of a rocket booster from the 1960s.

An example of a recent minimoon was a space rock up to 11.5 feet (3.5 m) across known as 2020 CD3 which was in Earth’s orbit for three years before leaving.

For 13 hours in 2015, scientists thought they had found a new temporary moon orbiting Earth. But they quickly realized their mistake when it was revealed that the "moon" was merely the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, prompting the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center to issue a retraction.

In addition to the moons that come and go from Earth’s orbit, there are space objects that NASA calls quasi-satellites, such as the asteroid 3753 Cruithne. These space rocks orbit the sun so similarly to Earth that they stick with our planet throughout its 365-day orbit. The quasi-moon Kamo’oalewa — suspected of being an artifact of the actual moon — is driven primarily by the sun’s gravity but appears to orbit Earth in a corkscrew-like path.

Some space objects, such as asteroid 2010 TK7, earn the title of "moon" because they get caught in the unique gravity of the sun-Earth or Earth-moon systems. The gravity of the two larger bodies creates regions of centripetal force, called Lagrange points, that hold smaller objects in place in gravitationally stable points in space, according to NASA. Two Lagrange points, L4 and L5, form an equilateral triangle with Earth. Effectively, the objects captured in these Lagrange points, called Trojans, fall in line with Earth and join its orbit around the sun.

"Parallel to the formation of the solid Moon and stabilization of its orbit around the Earth, the Lagrange points L4 and L5 have also arisen, and have started to collect [and] trap the interplanetary dust particles," Horváth told Live Science in an email. Some astronomers call these particle clouds "ghost moons." They’re also called Kordylewski clouds, after the Polish astronomer who first reported them in the 1960s. At first, many scientists were unconvinced, but since then, research by astronomers such as Horváth has confirmed that dust clouds are accumulating at these Lagrange points.

However, these ghost moons will never form a more solid moon, because the dust can’t conglutinate, or join or adhere together, Horváth said. And while the Lagrange points remain constant, the material in them is dynamic, constantly entering and exiting the dust cloud.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/how-many-moons-does-earth-have