That’s No Moon. That’s A–Oh, Wait, That’s Totally A Moon!

That bright dot? Totally a moon and not, I repeat NOT, a secret superpowered human being safely towing the asteroid out of our orbital path. Nope. Not the latter at all, I have been told to say.

 

You probably didn’t realize just how close you came to dying in a fiery explosion with the rest of the planet yesterday.  Asteroid 2004 BL86 came within 1.2 million kilometers of Earth (fine, 745,645 miles, but 1.2 million kilometers sounds so much asteroider) and that’s only about 3 times the distance from the Earth to our moon as reported by IFLScience.  The asteroid is the size of a mountain or big enough for Bruce Willis to land on and start drilling.  And turns out it has its own little moon.

Wait, this asteroid gets its own moon?  I’ve been way better than the asteroid all year long but do I have a moon?  NOOOO!  I want my own moon now, Santa!