Some discovery processes are serendipitous, others laborious, many begin when our curiosity is piqued. In the first story, the process began with a poster on the wall in “nerdy writer type’s” son’s bedroom, then meandered through a science writer, an artist, and astronomers. While the astronomers had made The Big Discovery, an entirely new category of space thing, the nerdy writer also had a discovery—a “profound cosmic revelation about what’s even possible in our universe.” His retelling of this discovery draws attention to the marvelous weirdness of space.
Scientists taking a closer look also found these surprises:
- a tiny frog the size of a fingernail,
- an ideological gap between Gen X men and women that also applies to other Gens,
- a “new” species discovered in bat poop,
- the true origin of atmospheric dust, and
- “a tiny invader [who] reconfigured predator-prey dynamics among iconic species.”
Other science news this week includes measuring the effectiveness of plastic bag bans, emergence of two cicada broods this summer for the first time in 221 years, and increased attention on scrapping scientific names that honor humans, especially troublesome humans.
First up is the nerdy writer and Zoozve
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
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