The moon isn’t alone; astronomers have discovered a new quasi-moon that’s following Earth’s orbit, but it’s only sticking around for a few more decades.
On August 29, 2025, the Pan-STARRS astronomical observatory in Hawaii announced that they’d picked up imagery of a quasi-moon, which was quickly named 2025 PN7.
A quasi-moon is defined as an asteroid that orbits the sun in close proximity to another planet, acting like a moon. However, it isn’t really a moon, as it follows its own orbit and will eventually leave to continue its independent path through space.
While the observatory was only recently able to identify this quasi-moon, data shows that it’s actually been following Earth for approximately 60 years. It’s unsurprising that it took astronomers so long to find it, though, given that it’s extremely dim and far out of range for most space telescopes.
2025 PN7 is currently riding along with Earth until it eventually returns to its own orbit in a few decades.
2025 PN7 is also quite small, measuring just 19 meters (62 feet) in diameter. Scientists calculate that it’ll be sticking around until 2083 as Earth’s diminutive companion in our collective journey through the cosmos.
Earth has a new mini-moon companion, and it’s vanishing in 2083
This quasi-moon isn’t the first little guy to tag along Earth’s orbit; astronomers have discovered a total of seven of these asteroids in the past, including one that they believe is a piece of our original moon that got blasted off in an impact with another celestial body.
While we’ve since identified near-earth objects (NEOS) as temporary travel buddies, some of them sparked fears of alien life in the past. In fact, when 1991 VG was discovered in the early 90s, concerns rose that it was a possible alien probe due to its close proximity to Earth’s orbit.
Unsplash.com: NASA Hubble Space TelescopeQuasi-moons are asteroids that orbit the sun in close proximity to another planet, acting as a kind of moon before returning to its own path through space.
Although these fears have since been put to rest, other theories of alien life interacting with Earth have since made their way into the limelight. 3I/ATLAS is currently getting a lot of attention from the scientific community as the third object to ever enter our solar system from another star system, fueling speculation of alien technology due to its brightness and rotation rate.
