An intriguing conversation on Twitter has been widely circulated over the weekend. Radiolab host Latif Nasser shared how he ventured into investigating the mystery of a celestial body labeled “Zoozve” on his 2-year-old’s astronomy poster. After noticing the label, he turned to Google and discovered that Venus has no moons, a fact confirmed by NASA.ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites. Further exploration yielded no references to “Zoozve”, and even a friend at NASA was stumped by the reference. Nasser reached out to the illustrator, who claimed to have taken the name from a list of moons in the Solar System.
In a nutshell, Nasser’s NASA friend (Liz Landau) eventually unraveled the mystery. The planet wasn’t Zoozve, but actually object 2002 VE 68. When newly discovered space objects are identified, they are given a provisional name based on their discovery year. As the European Space Agency explains, the provisional designation includes the year of its discovery followed by two letters indicating the order of discovery during that year, using specific letter combinations for different periods of the year. “The final discoveries of the year, between 16 and 31 December, have designations in the series YA, YB, YC.” The object proved to be more compelling than typical space rocks, as it was the first of its kind ever discovered due to its peculiar orbit.
It orbits the Sun, like all asteroids, with a ‘year’ of a little under 225 days, which is evidently shorter than an Earth year, according to the Tuorla Observatory. This orbit duration is comparable to that of the planet Venus, and it turns out that both object 2002 VE 68 and Venus are almost synchronized in their orbits around the Sun, making it the first quasi-moon discovered in the Solar System. As the name implies, quasi-moons are not fully fledged moons, as they orbit the Sun while also being affected by the planets they encounter along their path. Following the discovery of 2002 VE, other quasi-moons have been identified. Earth has two officially recognized quasi-moons.
2002 VE has been orbiting the Sun and interacting with Venus for quite some time, but the team that initially determined its orbit suspects it may have originated from elsewhere. Their computations suggest it has maintained its current orbital state for roughly seven millennia and is projected to remain for another five centuries. Close encounters with Venus and Mercury have been ruled out within the computed interval, but repetitive encounters with Earth do occur, indicating it may have been a near-Earth asteroid that was redirected into its present orbit around 7,000 years ago due to Earth’s influence. A subsequent paper, with more observations, suggested potential close encounters with Earth and revealed a highly complex orbital trajectory.
The researchers noted that 2002 VE68 will persist as a quasi-satellite of Venus for approximately 500 more years and its orbital behavior is influenced not only by Earth, with a substantial contribution from the Moon, but also by Mercury. The object exhibits resonant or near-resonant behavior with Mercury, Venus, and Earth, and while an actual collision with Earth within the next 10,000 years is highly improbable, it may encounter Earth as close as 0.04 au at an 8-year interval. [H/T: Radiolab]
