A new mini-moon the size of a city bus will soon be circling our planet and hanging out in our skies until Thanksgiving week. An asteroid named 2024 PT5 will enter Earth’s orbit this week, get caught there from Sept. 29 to Nov. 25, and then fly away into the solar system.
Scientists call such phenomena mini-moons. The asteroid was found by a group called ATLAS, which stands for Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, in August. The researchers who found it published a nonpeer-reviewed study about the asteroid.
Some past mini-moons, such as this one from 2020, have been discovered to be random pieces of space junk. The 2020 mini-moon was eventually identified as a rocket booster from the 1966 Surveyor 2 Centaur launch. But ATLAS reports this upcoming mini-moon is likely to be a real asteroid, which is simply defined as a small, rocky object that orbits the sun.
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