Earth Is Being Haunted by a Ghostly Dust Storm -- And There May Be More Out There

[Judi Lynn]

By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | October 31, 2018 08:26am ET

For all of its emptiness, space is a messy place filled with dust, grease, gas and a whole lot of man-made junk. When that interstellar schmutz gets caught in the gravitational nets of suns, planets and other massive celestial bodies, some interesting things can happen.

Take, for example, the twin balls of space dust known as Kordylewski clouds. First described in the 1950s, these roiling clouds of crud are hypothesized to exist in permanent orbits about 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) above our planet — one cloud pushed ahead of Earth and the other dragged behind it — thanks to a unique gravitational arrangement with the moon. Like cosmic tumbleweeds, these grainy dust balls are thought to roll wherever their heavenly hosts roll, picking up stray grit and grime and tiny asteroid chunks along the way, before finally spitting them back out again into the long prairie of space.

Concrete evidence that Kordylewski clouds exist has been hard to come by, for obvious reasons (space is big, and dust is small). But now, a team of Hungarian astronomers thinks they've finally captured one of the clouds on camera — exactly where decades of research predicted it would be. [Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit]

"The Kordylewski clouds are two of the toughest objects to find, and though they are as close to Earth as the Moon, [they] are largely overlooked by researchers in astronomy," lead study author Judit Slíz-Balogh, an astronomer at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, said in a statement. "It is intriguing to confirm that our planet has dusty pseudo-satellites in orbit alongside our lunar neighbor."

More:
https://www.livescience.com/63976-dust-cloud-above-earth-confirmed.html

[Kurt V.]

1. good writing in the article