How to Use moonlet in a Sentence

moonlet

noun
  • More than mere curiosities, these tiny moonlets could behave a lot like nascent, still-forming planets.
    — National Geographic, 5 Dec. 2016
  • Each impact would have ejected a disk of molten earth that slowly coalesced into a moonlet.
    — Alan Burdick, The New Yorker, 9 Jan. 2017
  • Sometimes the chunks collide and coalesce into objects large enough to be called moons or at least moonlets.
    — Steven Austad, AL.com, 30 Oct. 2017
  • The experimental target will be the moonlet of a bigger space rock.
    — NBC News, 12 Aug. 2021
  • Cassini discovered six moons — some barely a mile or two across — as well as swarms of moonlets that are still part of Saturn’s rings.
    — Washington Post, 12 Sep. 2017
  • In fact, the Dimorphos moonlet may have formed simply by spinning off the side of Didymos.
    — Ramin Skibba, Wired, 23 Nov. 2021
  • This has led to the formation of moons and moonlets, and considerable mass loss from the rings, Crida and his colleagues said.
    — Mike Wall, Scientific American, 17 Sep. 2019
  • Cassini scientists believe that this is one prominent region where large bodies, or moonlets, are found.
    — Stav Ziv, Newsweek, 6 Sep. 2017
  • Maybe, the team thought, all those moonlets are still there, welded into the body of the single object that’s visible today; from many collisions, one moon.
    — Alan Burdick, The New Yorker, 9 Jan. 2017
  • Small moonlets are forming from ring particles that coalesce together.
    — Vahe Peroomian, The Conversation, 14 Aug. 2019
  • According to Kaplan, about 20 moonlets likely combined to form the current moon.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 11 Jan. 2017
  • The mission will end with Dart ramming the main asteroid’s moonlet to change its orbit, a test that could one day save Earth from an incoming rock.
    — NBC News, 15 Oct. 2021
  • Boulders were scattered across a gray landscape, and the moonlet soon supplanted Didymos entirely in the camera’s field of view.
    — David W. Brown, The New Yorker, 6 Oct. 2022
  • Before the impact, the moonlet took 11 hours and 55 minutes to circle its parent asteroid.
    — Marcia Dunn, Anchorage Daily News, 11 Oct. 2022
  • All nature needs to create this invisible scaffolding are two celestial bodies, whether a star and its planet, or a planet and its moon, or even a moon and its moonlet.
    — Marina Koren, The Atlantic, 10 Dec. 2021
  • The seven Trojans range in size from a 40-mile asteroid and its half-mile moonlet to a hefty specimen exceeding 62 miles.
    — NBC News, 15 Oct. 2021
  • The small moonlet orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, lapping it around every 11 hours and 55 minutes.
    — Julia Musto, Fox News, 24 Sep. 2022
  • But only ice appears sticky enough to glom together into moonlets properly, according to the new work, so future models may be able to focus on fleshing out the icier scenarios.
    — Charlie Wood, Popular Science, 9 Apr. 2020
  • Instead, the researchers found that Saturn's inner moons likely formed through a series of collisions between tiny moonlets, known as the pyramidal regime formation scenario.
    — Charles Q. Choi, Space.com, 22 May 2018
  • Its odd flight path is caused by the competing gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun, which continually bend and torque the moonlet’s motions, preventing it from achieving a more conventional orbit.
    — Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 11 Nov. 2021
  • Monday's target was a 525-foot asteroid named Dimorphos, a moonlet of Didymos, which is a fast-spinning asteroid five times bigger that flung off the material that formed the junior partner.
    — Bradford Betz, Fox News, 27 Sep. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'moonlet.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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