Our moon is a classic. A solid moon, as far as moons go. But we can use a new, exciting moon, even for just a short while.
Enter 2026 QQ8, an extremely small rock the Earth pulled into its orbit in April, which researchers found in August and officially announced on October 29. According to reports from EarthSky and the Minor Planet Center, brought to our attention by Gizmodo, this temporary satellite is barely three feet wide. You know, about as long as your average skateboard.
When Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky first spotted the tiny moon in August, scientists immediately assumed it was just a discarded piece of space trash from an old rocket. Follow-up observations using the Lowell Discovery Telescope and the University of Hawaii’s 2.2-meter telescope confirmed it is a genuine, natural-born asteroid.
Earth Has a New Mini-Moon, and It’s Only About 3 Feet Wide
At around three feet, the chances of it becoming a Deep Impact/Armageddon-style asteroid are low. And even if it did have such lofty aspirations, it would be out of the norm, since 2026 QQ8 appears to casually fly by Earth about once a decade.
In April, its trajectory swung it a little closer to Earth than usual, catching it in Earth’s “Hill sphere,” aka the area around a space object where its own gravity is stronger than that of the even bigger space object it orbits. In this case, it means that this adorable little moon wandered into the exact spot it needed to be roped up by Earth’s gravity rather than the Sun’s.
2026 QQ8 is riding along at a bizarre, kidney-bean-shaped loop around us. At its closest point, it sits about one-and-a-half times farther away than our permanent Moon. There’s currently no threat of this thing wandering into our atmosphere, but even if it did, it’s so small it would burn apart pretty quickly, leaving behind a pretty streak in our atmosphere.
It’ll shake loose from Earth’s gravity and drift back into its regular solar orbit by December.
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