It won't be there forever, but Earth will have a second moon when a small asteroid begins to orbit the planet later this month, space researchers have announced.

Meet asteroid 2024 PT5, Earth’s latest mini-moon. “It is pretty cool,” Federica Spoto, an asteroid dynamics researcher at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, tells Robin George Andrews of the New York Times. A plethora of objects ...

In simple terms, a mini-moon is a space object that is temporarily captured in a planet's orbit, as opposed to regular moons, which are permanent fixtures. The researchers say 2024 PT5 will travel around the Earth in a “horseshoe” path for about two ...