For decades, astronomers have looked to the life cycles of stars to understand the origins of black holes, but a massive new 50-page review published this week suggests we should be looking at the primordial fabric of the cosmos instead.
Today at approximately 5:41 UTC, the Near-Earth Object 2026 TL6 zipped past our planet at a distance of merely 250,747 kilometers, hence well inside the orbit of the Moon! In fact, during its chaotic plunge through our local gravitational neighborhood, this cosmic interloper also buzzed the lunar surface before continuing its high-speed trajectory past Earth.
We like to think of the Moon as a quiet, dead rock floating silently in space. In reality? It’s a hyper-active cosmic shooting gallery. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to burn up incoming space debris, every tiny micrometeoroid slams directly into the lunar dust at speeds exceeding 30,000 mph.
Now, NASA Goddard is sending a specialized payload called LEMS-SP to the lunar surface aboard a commercial CLPS lander. Think of it as placing a hyper-sensitive stethoscope directly onto the skin of the Moon.