A near-earth asteroid (NEA) called Kamo’oalewa is orbiting us as a “minimoon” and scientists said Friday that they may know its origin story.

The Kamo’oalewa asteroid orbits in time with Earth and may just be a shattered piece of our regular moon, according to a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The research argues that Kamo’oalewa was likely flung into our immediate cosmos when a different mile-wide asteroid collided with our moon, creating the Giordano Bruno crater. ...

The minimoon itself was first noted in 2016 by experts at Hawaii’s Haleakala Observatory, according to Live Science. Though it is pretty small, at just 100 to 200 feet in diameter, it orbits the sun on a similar path to Earth.