Scientists have just confirmed we’ve been secretly sharing our orbit with a rock at about 62 feet wide (about as wide as a bowling lane is long) and nobody noticed for six decades.
2025 PN7, found by a team of researchers who published their findings in Research Notes Of The American Astronomical Society, is the latest addition to Earth’s unofficial crew of celestial buddies known as quasi-moons. Discovered on August 2 by the Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii, this wannabe moon has been hovering around us like the birds that chill atop an African hippo since the Eisenhower administration.
2025 PN7 isn’t actually orbiting Earth. It’s a “quasi-satellite,” meaning it’s a rock that mimics Earth’s orbit closely enough to seem like it’s hanging around with us. In reality, it’s just doing its orbiting the sun while within our general vicinity.
Astronomers Just Detected Earth’s Hidden Moon After Six Decades
It never gets closer than 2.8 million miles. But it also never strays farther than about 37 million. In cosmic terms, it’s the neighbor who keeps tabs on the neighborhood from their front porch. Scientists say PN7 has been on this parallel path for 60 years and is expected to keep pace for another 60 before eventually drifting off.
Quasi-moons are rare. Only about seven are known to exist, including the slightly more famous Kamoʻoalewa, a bigger, elongated space rock China is currently chasing down with its Tianwen-2 mission to collect samples.
PN7 is a reminder that Earth’s orbit, already packed with satellites and debris we’ve put up there, is more crowded than we thought. It’s also a reminder that we can look up to the stars all we want, with several teams across the planet keeping tabs on what’s going on above our heads with the latest equipment, and still not be able to catch everything that’s happening just under our noses.
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