The new paper describes another “quasi-moon” of Earth, and it is possible that the asteroids permeate each other have been chasing our planet for decades.
The Planetary Society’s semi-island states that it is “like a hand that is gravitational.” They are asteroids, and they appear to orbit our planet – from our perspective on Earth – as our permanent moon. But they only actually orbit the Sun and travel temporarily through the solar system along with our planets.
2025 If the newly detected asteroid condition known as PN7 has been confirmed, it is not the only object that appears to act as the Earth’s moon. Earth-like orbits have seven known quasi-drifts, “full of surprises,” said Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a research co-author at Compsenten University in Madrid.
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Of these semi-lakes, the 2025 PN7 is “the smallest, most stable and known semi-satellite on the planet,” Della Fuente Marcos told Live Science in an email.
The newly discovered asteroid is 62 feet (19 meters) wide, slightly smaller than the meteor that exploded in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. (The lower the size, the brighter the object. For comparison, most bare-eyed stars are below 6 size, while the bright star Sirius is almost magnitude -1.5.)
The discovery of a potential semi-moon was published on September 2nd in the American Astronomical Association’s Research Notes (AAS). The non-peer-reviewed journal aims to allow authors to “fasterly” astronomy and “fasterly” astronomy and “fasterly” by editors in place of peer review to “faster” the paper “fastered by editors for appropriateness and form.” This approach allowed research authors Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos, also at Complutense University in Madrid.
Related: First image of China’s mystical “Quasi Moon” probe revealed a few weeks after it was secretly launched into space
The International Astronomical Union’s 2025 Official August 29th Circulating PN7 is an observation by the Pan-Starrs1 telescope at the Halea Color Observation Deck in Maui, Hawaii, and shows data on objects dating back to July 30th only.
The designation of a semi-moon was first proposed in 2025 PN7 by French journalist and amateur astronomer Adrian Cofinette.
“The 2025 PN7 will look like a semi-satellite on Earth for the next 60 years,” Coffinet writes. Another person in the group said that it appears to have already been flying near us for about 70 years from the object’s orbit.
So why didn’t astronomers notice the 2025 PN7? “It’s small, faint, and the windows of view from the Earth are pretty undesirable, so it’s not surprising that it hasn’t been noticed for a long time,” said de la Fuente Marcos.
More semi-islands may be lurking there. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which has recently become operational and is able to scan such objects, “may reveal as much as the 2025 PN7,” added De La Fuente Marcos.
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