Earth has company. A rock no bigger than a person, catalogued as 2026 QQ8, has been looping around our planet since April, held for now by Earth’s gravity. Nobody will spot it with a backyard telescope, yet astronomers are keen to follow it before it slips away again around the turn of the year.
Credit for the find goes to Krisztián Sárneczky from Hungary, a prolific hunter of small bodies, who caught it in his images on 20 August. Early on, experts suspected it was a piece of human-made debris, perhaps part of an old rocket. Follow-up work with large instruments in Arizona and on Hawaii settled the question in favour of a natural origin, and the Minor Planet Center announced the temporary capture on 29 October.
Its usual path around the Sun takes 359 days and closely shadows Earth’s, bringing the two together roughly once a decade. This time QQ8 drifted inside the Hill sphere, the zone where our planet’s pull beats the Sun’s. There is no danger: its closest pass will be about 568,000 km away, around one and a half times the Moon’s distance, and an object of one to two metres would burn up in the atmosphere anyway.
The visit is brief. After roughly one and a half laps it is expected to break free in December or January. It will return in 2058, though not close enough to be captured a second time.
Such stopovers are less rare than they sound. Earlier temporary moons include 2020 CD3 and 2024 PT5, and recent research suggests half a dozen may be circling Earth at any moment, some possibly chipped off the Moon by impacts. Sharper cameras and smarter software simply make them easier to catch.
