All About Asteroid 2025 PN7, Earth's New Quasi-Moon

Social media is flooded with the news that Earth now has two moons. The news is partially right as the buzz around the so-called second moon is linked to space object 2025 PN7, which is something called a "quasi-moon". It was first spotted by a group of researchers at the University of Hawaii during a routine telescope survey. The Pan-STARRS observatory, located on the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii, discovered it on August 2, 2025.

According to researchers, 2025 PN7 is a small, 18-36 meter wide space rock that's been dubbed Earth's "second moon" due to its unique orbit. The newly found asteroid is about four million kilometres away, ten times farther than the Moon and will be with us for a very long time. 

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It has been there since the 1960s, but managed to escape the human-made telescopes because it is very small. "It can only be detected by currently available telescopes when it gets close to our planet as it did this summer," Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a researcher on the faculty of mathematical sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid, said as quoted by CNN.

"Its visibility windows are few and far between. It is a challenging object," de la Fuente Marcos explained. He has authored a paper about 2025 PN7, published in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society on September 2.

2025 PN7 is officially Earth's new "quasi-moon"

Quasi-satellites are our closest companions, and they differ from temporary "mini-moons" that occasionally orbit Earth, such as 2024 PT5, which circled the planet for two months in 2024. It could have been an ancient fragment of the Moon.

The authors explained in the paper that the quasi-satellites are objects which are capable of longer engagements with Earth.

They further revealed that this quasi-moon had been orbiting the Sun in a 1:1 resonance with Earth, meaning it completes one solar orbit in the same time as our planet. Notably, 2025 PN7 will drift away in open space eventually, as it is not gravitationally bound.

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It was a major milestone when astronomers discovered the first asteroid in an Earth-like orbit, 1991 VG, in December 1991. "Over three decades later, it is now widely accepted that such objects are natural and constitute a secondary asteroid belt that occupies the region in which the Earth-Moon system orbits around the Sun, defining the Arjuna dynamical class," the authors wrote in the paper.