Despite what another commenter says, the moon will not leave earths captive field. It will recede until it gets tidally locked with earth, and both the tide cycles and the moons recension will halt. That is, if there still is water in a few billion years and it hasn't been replaced with Brawndo
> a temporary satellite is any body that enters the Hill sphere of a planet at a sufficiently low velocity such that it becomes gravitationally bound to the planet for some period of time. [1]
again stretching my understanding too far, I think this basically means that in the absence of other celestial bodies the satellite would be in a stable orbit, but that in reality after some time it gets far enough away that the sun's gravitational pull dominates and stops it from making a full orbit.
Presumably entering such an orbit is only possible due to forces from other celestial bodies in the first place, since otherwise if you reversed time it would spontaneously leave its orbit. In other words, the act of the earth "capturing" the object is ultimately performed by external forces?
The article agrees with you. It's always those pesky headlines.
Is it a NASA thing to deploy outrageously absurd analogies for no apparent reason? Is there a checkout desk for space objects?
Is the article implying that we don't know the Moon's (I assume they're referring to the capital-M one) diameter to at least kilometer-precision...?
To me, an estimate suggests that there's error bars; an approximation suggests that there's variance that we can quantify (or at least we're very confident about our error bars).
Also, Earth already has a second moon: 3753 Cruithne.
https://petapixel.com/2023/01/26/these-are-the-highest-resol...
https://genius.com/The-b-52s-theres-a-moon-in-the-sky-called...