The Earth’s New Guest

Listen to Today's Edition:

Earth welcomed a new neighbor Sunday that will be orbiting our planet for the next two months as a “mini-moon.”

Meet 2024 PT5, a 33-foot-long asteroid that has been chasing after Earth for years and finally got close enough to be pulled closer by Earth’s gravity, according to the Independent.

Astronomers first spotted the celestial object last month through NASA’s Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a global network of telescopes designed to spot potential asteroid threats.

Fortunately for humanity, 2024 PT5 is too small to cause any damage to our planet – about 1,000 times smaller than the space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago.

Researchers believe it originated from the Arjuna asteroid belt, a group of objects that share Earth-like orbits around the Sun, making them more likely to approach Earth.

The mini-moon will stay within Earth’s gravitational pull until Nov. 25, they wrote in their study. During this time, it will act as a temporary satellite before breaking free from Earth’s gravity and resuming its orbit around the Sun.

But it will visit us again sometime in 2055.

Sadly, stargazers and amateur astronomers won’t be able to see it unless they own a professional telescope.

“A telescope with a diameter of at least 30 inches plus a CCD or CMOS detector is needed to observe this object; a 30-inch telescope and a human eye behind it will not be enough,” Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a co-author of the study, told Space.com.

Mini-moons are not a new phenomenon and Earth has had its share of visiting space rocks, including in 1992 and 2022.

For an object to become a temporary satellite, it “needs to come close enough to Earth to get diverted by our planet’s gravity,” University of Maryland astronomer Derek Richardson, who was not involved in the paper, explained to the Washington Post.

“At the same time, it must approach relatively slowly, at a speed of 2,200 miles per hour – too fast, and the asteroid might escape Earth’s gravitational leash entirely,” he added.

Although described as a satellite, 2024 PT5 won’t complete a full orbit around Earth but will follow a horseshoe-shaped path.

The incomplete orbit has prompted some researchers to refrain from calling it a mini-moon, the Smithsonian wrote.