Just in time for Independence Day, two asteroids, each roughly 120 feet in diameter, will safely pass by Earth.
In a fun homage to this American holiday, The Jerusalem Post noted that these asteroids are approximately the size of 32 times the height of George Washington, which provides a relatable scale for their size as well as a fun way to mark the day.
The asteroids have been designated 2025 MY88 and 2025 MV89, both discovered this year, as noted by the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).As is unsurprising for the tendency of these articles, these asteroids being measured in terms of the founding president of the United States are set to pass by the Earth on the Fourth of July, also known as American Independence Day.In what was rather surprising, both asteroid 2025 MY88 and its companion 2025 MV89 happen to actually be rather close in size.The first has an estimated diameter of up to 61 meters, with the second having an estimated diameter of as much as 65 meters.
In even more interesting space news, an interstellar object was recently detected entering our solar system.
For only the third time, astronomers have found something passing through our solar system that came from outside the solar system.This interstellar object, known as 3I/ATLAS, is still pretty far from the sun, currently located between the orbits of the asteroid belt and Jupiter but heading toward the inner solar system.“This thing is traveling pretty fast” said Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.Relative to the sun, it is currently moving at about 130,000 miles per hour and it will continue to accelerate as the sun’s gravity pulls on it.
The object is a comet that is coming from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. It is slated to make its closet approach to the Sun this fall.
“These things take millions of years to go from one stellar neighborhood to another, so this thing has likely been traveling through space for hundreds of millions of years, even billions of years,” Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, said Thursday. “We don’t know, and so we can’t predict which star it came from.”The newest visitor is 416 million miles from the sun, out near Jupiter, and heading this way at a blistering 37 miles per second.NASA said the comet will make its closest approach to the sun in late October, scooting between the orbits of Mars and Earth — but closer to the red planet than Earth at a safe 150 million miles away.Astronomers around the world are monitoring the icy snowball that’s been officially designated as 3I/Atlas to determine its size and shape. Chodas told The Associated Press there have been more than 100 observations since its discovery, with preliminary reports of a tail and a cloud of gas and dust around the comet’s nucleus.
So it looks like the Universe is offering up some additional sky attractions for us to enjoy this July 4th!
Image by perplexity.ai.
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