Earth's distant rocky companion was likely a fragment of the moon blasted into space thousands of years ago, according to a new study that deepens our understanding of the types of space rocks that drift near our planet and occasionally impact it.
Last year, the space rock named 2024 PT5 — about the size of a school bus —drifted past Earth so slowly that it lingered near our planet for nearly two months before moving away. It returned in early January, whizzing by at a safe distance of 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or about five times as far from our planet as the moon is. It then moved on to continue its trajectory solo, according to NASA.
