Holy hell, that was an awesome read.
Your comment convinced me to read it. Thank you!!!
Was expecting clickbait, but instead got an interesting Nitter thread about quasi-moons and the nature of asteroid hunting
I’ve developed a reflex to not click on clickbait. Then I saw all these comments… Maybe I’ll get over myself and click it later.
Same here - and then I start wondering if all the positive comments are just part of the bait. I need to be less suspicious!
Anyway, I clicked and it was worth it - but can you trust me?? ;-)
Okay I finally read it. Worth it.
It’s worth it. I avoid clickbait and Twitter, yet even with those two strikes, it was a homerun.
Okay I finally read it. Worth it.
Ok that was much more entertaining than I expected.
Do you know that when you look at a planet and you see that light, that planet’s not even there? That’s just a light. That’s just your neighbor shining a flashlight right into your yard looking for 'coons, and he says “What are you doing in my back yard? …With that flashlight?”
And I told him “I’m shining in the window so I can teach your son about the universe”.
He said, “Get out of my yard, and why are you communicating to my son? Why are you in all black, behind my bushes, shining a light into my house?”
And I said, “I’m teaching your son about the universe! I’m shining a light right in there and exploring his room, as he’s looking out and exploring the universe. I turn the light off and I see your son go to bed, and I turn the light back on and I do swirls on his wall like a comet’s tail.
I do this every night with your son.”Oh man Tim and Eric lol. Wasn’t expecting them this morning .
JFC, that was awesome.
Probably the least depressing read in a while. Thanks for sharing.
glad you enjoyed it. although if you really genuinely haven’t read anything as positive as this in a while (or more positive) then you might have some media cleanup to do. this kind of content should be the norm - and it IS, for me!
This was a fun read. TIL about quasi moons and the first one ever found. The authors enthusiasm for space is really fun. It reminds me of how I feel about any space thing when I’m baked
Great post. I knew immediately what happened with the numbers and letters.
Instance has been rate limited 😕
I posted a transcription of it to another comment here. But I’m not seeing it on refresh. So here’s a link to my comment. Hope it helps.
Long live ZOOZVE!
Bummer… Was really curious to read that.
Keep trying, it’s 100% worth the read. Really neat stuff
Did in the end, very neat indeed
I was just reading about this. This is a type of neologism known as a Ghost Word!
the classic example (you may have heard from Vsauce) is Dord.
It’s funny how I would see this the very next day after learning about it! (Even though that may not be true for the rest of you.) Anyone know what THAT phenomenon is called?
Maybe some sort of aberrant Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (frequency illusion)? Although that is usually more like, I bought a Camry and now I see them everywhere, but they were everywhere before- I just didn’t notice until I had one.
I think that was the one I was thinking of
Great read!
I love this pic.
Curious how this compares to Cruithne which is also “sort of orbiting but not really” with Earth?
Thank you very much. This was oddly inspiring!!!
This is the cool stuff I come here to read. Very interesting!
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I got it to come up on the third or fourth attempt (after the same rate limit errors your were seeing). Even then it was not the easiest to read because that social network is a horrible choice to use for a longer story/article.
But it is an interesting read.
Below is my transcription of the dozen+ posts by the guy (who I’ve also credited), minus all the meme gifs he included.
Latif Nasser @latifnasser
Last January, I noticed something peculiar in my 2yo’s bedroom that - after a year of obsessive reporting - led me to a profound cosmic revelation about what’s even possible in our universe.
So about a year ago, I was putting my little guy to bed in his crib and I noticed a strange detail on the solar system poster up on his wall
[Photo of a kid-friendly infographic poster of the solar system]
Venus had a moon called Zoozve. Huh, I thought. Never heard of that.
Put the kid to bed, went back to my room and googled “Does Venus have a moon?” First hit was from NASA: “Venus has no moons.” Weird
Then I googled “Zoozve” and got no results, literally zero results in English. Only results were in Czech and they were about zoos. Not what I was looking for.
I called a friend (@lizlandau) who has worked with NASA for a decade and she confirmed: Venus is completely moonless. And she had definitely never heard of Zoozve.
This started to bug me: why make up a moon on a kids’ poster? And why call it Zoozve?! (Best guess: it was a prank and Zoozve was the illustrator’s dog’s name.)
So I called the illustrator, a Brit named Alex Foster. (He does have a dog, but it’s named Winnie.) He didn’t know much about astronomy but he swore he didn’t make it up. He said he found it on a big list of all the moons online. I believed him, but couldn’t find the list.
Around that time, I got a text from Liz at NASA: “Wait Latif I think I figured it out!!!”
It wasn’t ZOOZVE, it was 2002-VE, which is an actual object near Venus. The illustrator Alex confirmed that he probably misread his own writing. Aha! 2002VE! Okay so what IS 2002VE??
2002-VE68 (its technical designation) is a giant rock. Imagine a gray pockmarked potato the size of the Eiffel Tower. (We don’t have pics of it, but this one is similar.)
But the weirder and harder question: is Zoozve (gonna just keep calling it Zoozve) a moon of Venus or not?
So I tracked down the person who discovered it: Brian Skiff at Lowell Observatory in Arizona.
He has actually discovered so many asteroids that when I talked to him, he had no idea what I was talking about, genuinely didn’t remember this one.
He said that he found it as part of the LONEOS project, an industrial-scale asteroid scavenger hunt that Congress funded during the 90s/00s when everyone was obsessed with what would happen if one hit earth. Sometimes they discovered hundreds of asteroids in a single night.
Once Skiff realized Zoozve wasn’t a threat, he stopped tracking it. BUT I found 2 astronomers who kept looking: Seppo Mikkola in Finland & Paul Wiegert in Canada.
They told me that Zoozve is NOT a moon of Venus. But it’s also NOT NOT a moon of Venus. It’s both and neither. WTH?
Turns out basically everything in our solar system orbits ONE thing. Earth orbits the Sun. The Moon orbits the Earth. Etc. If you are a body in the solar system, you hula hoop one bigger thing. That’s what you do … Except for Zoozve.
Zoozve orbits one thing: the sun. It spends all day every day doing that. BUT Venus also has a teeny gravitational toehold on it such that it ALSO ORBITS VENUS AT THE SAME TIME.
It’s a whole new category of thing. Something that orbits a star and a planet at once. Something that is not a moon, but also not not a moon.
They call it … a quasi-moon.
Astronomers had been speculating that such an object could exist for 100+ years, but this was the first time anyone saw one … not only in our solar system but in the entire universe!
But since they found Zoozve they’ve been finding all sorts of other quasi-moons (aka co-orbital objects) all over the solar system. They ring around the sun, but then seem to do weird patterns around their closest planet
Some (called Trojans) stay in one spot ahead of or behind the planet, like a secret service agent. Some do horseshoes: go mostly around a planet but then turn around and go back the other way. My favorites do a comma shape, just wiggling back&forth. Those are called tadpoles.
And by the way, Earth even has at least seven different quasi moons dancing around us right now!!! The most recent one was discovered in 2023!!
Also, quasi-moons can switch planets! We (Earth) were probably the ones who - 7,000 yrs ago - flung Zoozve over to Venus in the first place. Zoozve is going to leave Venus a few millennia from now, but no one knows where it will go next.
Anyway, I think this is so cool because everything else on the solar system map is so regular and orderly, but not quasi-moons! It’s like we discovered a bunch of new weirdos who seem to be dancing to the beat of their own drum.
Contrary to the posters, we don’t live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club, and while some of us are doing the same old waltz with our same old moon, there are bodies out there do-si-do-ing their way all over the solar system.
How inspiring is it that we are alive at a time when we are just discovering this new class of paradoxical and promiscuous rock stars like Zoozve that remind us how weird and temporary and connected everything in the universe is. And how much we still don’t know.
One last thing. If you want to hear more about this strange object, check out the latest episode of Radiolab. Tons more there I haven’t mentioned here. radiolab.org/podcast/zoozve
Including my detailed plan to officially rename 2002-VE68 to “ZOOZVE” to immortalize the typo and thus retroactively make the poster in my kid’s room correct! This plan falls into the category of so-crazy-it-just-might-work. And we will know the answer VERY soon. END OF THREAD.
awesome, tysm. I found another nitter instance that was able to serve it up, and if anyone else can, I recommend viewing it for the pictures, at least for the picture of the poster itself if for no other reason.
