The tiny asteroid will complete a wide orbit over the course of 53 days, but don't get your hopes up about seeing it.
Starting at the end of September, Earth will have two moons, but don’t get too used to it. The situation is going to last less than two months, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to actually see this transient second moon.. The object is on a trajectory in which it will be temporarily caught by Earth’s gravity.
2024 PT5 is very tiny, measuring just 33 feet wide, so don’t expect to see it with the naked eye. Even those of you equipped with backyard telescopes probably won’t get a glimpse, as the asteroid will at best have a relatively dim magnitude value of 22, according to, the pair wrote that the dual-moon scenario is rare for our planet but not unheard of. A similar thing happened in July 2006, when a mini-moon hung around Earth for about a year.
As the duo wrote in their paper, the asteroid could have originated in the Arjuna asteroid belt—a collection of near-Earth objects that have orbits similar to our planet’s. “The object is unlikely to be artificial as its short-term dynamical evolution closely resembles that of 2022 NX1,” another asteroid that became a mini-moon in 1981, and again in 2022, the pair wrote.
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