A Stadium-Sized Rock Crossed Our Doorstep at 45,000 Miles an Hour A boulder big enough to fill a stadium tore past Earth at about 45,200 miles an hour (20.2 kilometers per second), and it never came anywhere close to hitting anything. That was asteroid 2026 OH3, at its nearest to Earth on September 11, 2026, … Read more
The Asteroid Pass We Couldn’t Confirm Picture a rock roughly the length of a football stadium sliding past Earth without so much as a ripple, no warning, no danger, nothing that would ever make the local news. That’s the shape of a claim now attached to an object designated 2026 OH3: a close approach said … Read more
A Close Pass We Can’t Vouch For, Yet A small asteroid supposedly slipped past Earth close enough to count as a genuinely tight approach by solar-system standards, several times farther out than the Moon but still well inside what usually counts as roomy. That’s the claim, anyway. It arrived with a name, 2026 RJ, a … Read more
458 Plutos to Match One Earth The number that most quietly disqualified Pluto from the planet category was never the orbit shape or the crowded neighborhood. It was the mass. Pluto carries 1.303 × 10²² kilograms, and you would need 458.3 of them to reach Earth’s 5.9722 × 10²⁴ kilograms. Not a shrunken version of … Read more
A Year Before the Credits Roll A planet completes one full lap around its host, a complete year, start to finish, in 2.177 hours. Buy a large popcorn, sit through a feature film, and its year would be over before the credits roll. The measured orbital period, extracted from radio telescope data, is 7,837.024 seconds. … Read more
Thirteen and a Half Steps Thirteen and a half Moon-distances sounds threatening. It isn’t, it is roughly 5.235 million km of open space between Earth’s surface and a fast-moving rock, and the rock had been on the books for four years before it got there. Asteroid 2022 RK passed Earth on September 6, 2026, at … Read more
Nine and a Half Moons from Home A rock somewhere between 66 and 230 feet across swept past Earth at nine-and-a-half times the Moon’s distance, and a telescope in the Arizona mountains caught it on the way in, eighteen months before it arrived. The rock is asteroid 2025 CL3. On September 1, 2026, at 04:24 … Read more
Nearly Five Moon-Orbits Out, and It Still Makes the List The gap between an asteroid and Earth’s surface can be 142 Earth diameters wide and still earn a place in the catalog as a close approach worth watching. That is not a technicality. It is just the arithmetic of the solar system, where even your … Read more
