LOS ANGELES - Earth is about to gain a new “mini-moon,” but it won’t stay around for long. The newly discovered asteroid, named 2024 PT5, will temporarily be captured by Earth’s gravity and orbit our world from September 29 to November 25, according to astronomers. Then, the space rock will return to a heliocentric orbit, which is an orbit around the sun.
Details about the ephemeral mini-moon and the horseshoe-shaped path it travels were published this month in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society. Astronomers first spotted the asteroid on August 7 using the South Africa-based observatory of the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS. The asteroid is likely about 37 feet (11 meters) in diameter, but more observations and data are needed to confirm its size, said lead study author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a researcher on the faculty of mathematical sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid.
The space rock could be anywhere between 16 and 138 feet (5 and 42 meters) in diameter, potentially larger than the asteroid that entered Earth’s atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013. About 55 to 65 feet (17 to 20 meters) in size, the Chelyabinsk asteroid exploded in the air, releasing 20 to 30 times more energy than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and generating brightness greater than the sun. Debris from the space rock damaged more than 7,000 buildings and injured more than 1,000 people.
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