Of Asteroids and Exomoons

By Maryjo

The search for scientific knowledge continues…and some of it is turning out to validate Urantia Book teachings. Little by little, science is catching up to what Urantia Book students have known for a long time. Today we want to share two such findings.

These two articles: Found! Weird Asteroid in Jupiter’s Orbit Is 1st Interstellar Immigrant by Mike Wall – and – The Moons of Some Giant Alien Planets Could Host Life by Chelsea Gohd, both from Space.com report the results of research recently finished. We’ll blog about these below, but first, here are the pertinent findings from the articles:

About the “weird asteroid” and its relation to retrograde motion:

2015 BZ509 was discovered in November 2014, also by Pan-STARRS (which is short for “Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System,” in case you were wondering). The space rock is an oddball: Its orbit is “retrograde,” meaning 2015 BZ509 moves around the sun in the opposite direction of Jupiter, Earth and most other bodies in the solar system.

And about life on exomoons:

No exomoons have yet been confirmed. But if any of those huge exoplanets have natural satellites — which seems likely, given how common moons are in our own solar system — they could be especially promising abodes for life, study team members said.