My Whole Life Has Been A Lie, Turns Out Earth Has Always Had Three Moons And Not One!

Since the dawn of man, we've held our Moon is a special. Maybe because of how beautiful it is, or the fact that it's the only one we have. However, after more than 50 years of arguments and hypotheses, we finally know that it's actually not our only moon.

Janez Volmajer

According to a new study from the E?tv?s Lor¨¢nd University in Hungary, Earth actually has three moons orbiting. While one is the star of many a movie, song, and viral photo, there are two others passing silently through the night. And we've never really noticed them because they're essentially just dust clouds.

The research team managed to capture what looks like mysterious clouds, hovering about 402336 km away from us. That's about the same distance our Moon keeps too. And even if you're hearing about this for the first time, scientists have known about them for decades.

The dust clouds were first seen in 1961, but experts had previously theorised about their existence long before. They were named the Kordylewski clouds, after the Polish astronomer

Kazimierz Kordylewski who first spotted them.

"The Kordylewski clouds are two of the toughest objects to find, and though they are as close to Earth as the moon, are largely overlooked by researchers in astronomy," the study's coauthor Judit Sl¨ªz-Balogh told National Geographic. "It is intriguing to confirm that our planet has dusty pseudo-satellites in orbit alongside our lunar neighbour."

Gabor Horvath

In the new study, the researchers found that each Kordylewski cloud measures about 15 by 10 degrees wide. That means they cover an estimated area about 105,000km by 72,000km, almost nine times wider than the Earth. But though the clouds themselves are massive, they're composed of particles so small they measure only about a micrometre across. When sunlight reflects off these particles, they glow slightly, but that glow has always been faint, which is why we had trouble finding them. We only managed to properly study them this time around thanks to the advancement of technology, using special polarising filters

These dust moons, instead of scattering, are trapped in what we call Lagrange points. These are specific points in space where the gravitational pull of two orbiting objects is balanced out by the centripetal force of their orbits. Kordylewski was studying some of these Lagrange points looking for a solid object back in the 1950s. Instead, he found giant balls of dust.

The dust in the Kordylewski clouds is both old and new at the same time. After all, the dust keeps getting cycled out thanks to shifts in the gravity of the Earth or Moon. however, it's also always gathering dust from other sources like the Perseid meteor shower each year.

Far from just being an interesting discovery, this find could also have an impact on future space missions. Some of these, like the James Webb Space telescope launch, involve parking at these Lagrange points in order to remain stable while also saving fuel. Scientists now may not only have a chance to study the clouds up close, they may have to tweak the spacecrafts to also deal with the massive amount of dust.