A stadium-sized asteroid will fly past Earth on May 9, and you can watch it live (video)
On May 9, a stadium-sized potentially hazardous asteroid will pass by Earth, and you can watch the flyby happen in real time courtesy of a livestream from The Virtual Telescope Project.
The main belt asteroid 612356 2002 JX8 is estimated to have a diameter of 950 feet (290 meters) according to NASA, and will pose absolutely no threat to Earth during its 2025 flyby.
The Virtual Telescope Project's YouTube channel will go live at 4:30 p.m. EDT (20:30 GMT) on May 9, just a few hours before 2002 JX8 makes its closest approach to Earth at (11:02 GMT). The stream will also show views of the asteroid Vesta, which reached opposition on May 2, and is still relatively bright in the night sky.
TOP TELESCOPE PICK:
Want to explore the solar system with your own eyes? The Celestron NexStar 4SE is ideal for beginners wanting quality, reliable and quick views of celestial objects. For a more in-depth look at our Celestron NexStar 4SE review.
"We did follow-up observations of the Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (612356) 2002 JX8, slowly approaching our planet: on 9 May 2025, it will safely come as close as 4.2 millions of km [(2.6 million miles)] from us, 10.9 times the average lunar distance," wrote Gianluca Masi, founder of The Virtual Telescope Project in a recent blog post. "We will show it live!"
Masi's organization has successfully captured several images of 2002 JX8 in the run up to its May 9 flyby, in which the asteroid appears as a distinct dot of light that could be seen shifting position relative to the stars behind it. The Virtual Telescope Project offers free online observing sessions for the public for asteroid flybys and similar events, as well as access to individual robotic telescopes.
Potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) such as 2002 JX8 are categorized as such based on their brightness (magnitude +22.0 or lower/brighter) and their ability to perform a "threatening close approach to Earth," according to NASA, which is defined as coming within within 0.05 astronomical units, or 4.6 million miles (7.5 million km) of our planet. For reference, 1 AU is the equivalent to 93 million miles (150 million km), which is the average distance separating Earth and the sun.
NASA scientists believe that there are around 4,700 PHAs whizzing around our solar system, based on observations from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. However, we will likely never see one actually impact our planet's surface. The agency estimates that an asteroid with a diameter of around 500 ft (140 m) impacts Earth just once every 20,000 years, while an asteroid with a diameter of 3,000 ft (1,000 m) collides with our planet once every 700,000 years.
Scientists at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies responsible for tracking the long term potential orbits of near-Earth objects have also stated that it is unlikely that a large asteroid capable of causing widespread damage will strike Earth in the next 100 years.
That leaves you plenty of time to get to know the night sky! If you want to catch a glimpse of a solar system planet or globular cluster for yourself, then be sure to check out our guides for the best binoculars deals and the best telescope deals in 2025.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Night Sky: How noctilucent clouds are made and Wales' space progress
This week saw a wonderful display of noctilucent clouds across the region as last Sunday evening's skies took on a dramatic and eerie appearance. Nick Edwards managed to capture the event over Newport, as the sun's rays reaching out from far below the horizon lit up tiny frozen water droplets high up in the Earth's atmosphere, creating the shimmering effect of wispy white clouds tinged with blue. Taken from the Latin for 'night-shining', we can expect further activity throughout the summer. We have a full moon on Thursday, July 10. This particular full moon is often referred to as a 'Buck Moon' because of the emergence of antlers on a deer buck's forehead during this part of the season. In Celtic folklore, terms such as 'Mead' or 'Herb' Moon can be found, with the Anglo-Saxons referring to it as a 'Hay Moon.' Space news and the proposed cuts to NASA's budget by the Trump administration will more than likely impact Europe's ExoMars rover mission which is already behind schedule. With the aim of placing a rover to explore the surface of Mars, it would seem the European Space Agency, (ESA), may have to go it alone. Recently, the Snowdonia Space Centre opened its Space Test and Training Centre, (STTC), with a day of demonstrations including rocket launches and the upward despatching of a high-altitude balloon. In a move to stay competitive with the rest of the UK and indeed Europe, the day signified Wales' intent to be at the forefront of enabling those interested in having their high-tech payloads delivered into space via rockets. It's a bold and innovative concept which is slowly gathering momentum but for those who lived during a Wales that was sustained by the coal industry and in more recent times the steel industry, a stark reminder that the shift in economic focus now lies firmly with the likes of such technology as 'microgravity manufacturing.' Attended by Rebecca Evans, MS, Welsh Government cabinet secretary for economy, energy, and planning, the new centre has received £820,000 of funding from the UK Space Agency with Matt Archer, its launch director, also in attendance. All told, with other financial contributions, £1.3 million has been invested with a view to boost the local economy and employment opportunities. With six other such Spaceports at sites including Argyll in western Scotland and Newquay in Cornwall, there has to be an exercise in caution following the announcement last week that the SaxaVord Spaceport in Lamba Ness, Shetlands Islands, (which appears to be further down the operational line than others), has delayed its first satellite launch from 2025 to 2026. Finally this week, the Earth's rotation during July and August is set to speed up with Wednesday, July 9, expected to be 1.30 milliseconds shorter than the usual length of a day. The speeding up over the two months is down to several factors, including sea levels, bucking the trend that overall rotation of the Earth is slowly down. Send your astrophotography pictures to: thenightsky@
The Verge
3 hours ago
- The Verge
Trump's spending bill includes $85 million to move a Space Shuttle.
Trump's spending bill includes $85 million to move a Space Shuttle. The target is Space Shuttle Discovery, which Texas senators are attempting to snatch from the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian estimates moving it could cost more than $300 million, and there's the small detail that the modified Boeing 747 used to transport the shuttles is no longer available.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
What are dwarf planets — and how many are there?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. In 2006, Pluto was famously demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet. It remains the most famous dwarf planet today, but there are others in our solar system, including potentially hundreds that haven't been discovered yet. But what, exactly, is a dwarf planet? And how many dwarf planets are there? A dwarf planet is a celestial body that is smaller than a planet but bigger than an asteroid or other small rock in the solar system. They're not planets because they only meet two of the three criteria for something in space to be considered a true planet. A planet is defined by three qualities: It orbits the sun, it's mostly round, and it's massive enough for its gravity to have mostly kicked large objects from its orbit. Pluto and some other known dwarf planets meet the first two criteria but not the third because they orbit in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune filled with small icy debris. When Pluto was first discovered in 1930, it (and other similar objects in the Kuiper Belt) were so far away and faint that they were really hard to spot, even with the most powerful telescopes at the time. Indeed, the very qualities that make something a dwarf planet make those objects particularly hard to detect. Related: James Webb telescope discovers 'a new kind of climate' on Pluto, unlike anything else in our solar system "There are a few things that work against us spotting them," Mathew Yu, an astronomer at UCLA, told Live Science in an email. "They are far away from the sun. The reflected light from them is faint as a result. Some have low reflectivity, making light reflecting off them fainter." Plus, "they move slowly across the sky due to their large distance from the sun," he added. "They go around the sun once every hundreds of Earth years. So their relative motions to the background stars are small. For astronomers with a limited observing time, these objects become hard to detect." Astronomers got a lot better at finding objects in the Kuiper Belt in the 1990s and 2000s as telescope technology improved. And once they could see a bit better, they noticed there were a lot more rocks out there with orbits similar to Pluto's. Between 2002 and 2005, astronomers found seven more particularly large rocks: Haumea, Makemake, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Eris and Salacia. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) — the group of astronomers that decides on official names and terms for things in space — decided in 2006 that a new category was needed to describe these objects that were pretty big but not big enough to clear their orbits as a true planet does. Thus, the name "dwarf planet" was born. With eight named large rocks in the Kuiper Belt, you might think that means there are eight dwarf planets. However, not all astronomers agree on the number. "Accepted numbers range between around 10 to a few hundred in the Kuiper Belt alone," Yu said. "Some estimate that there may be up to tens of thousands of them beyond the Kuiper Belt." The IAU has officially recognized only five dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris in the Kuiper Belt, plus Ceres in the asteroid belt. We've sent space probes to only two of these: Pluto (visited by NASA's New Horizons) and Ceres (visited by NASA's Dawn), both of which flew by those bodies in 2015. Astronomers who observe dwarf planets, however, tend to recognize nine: the previous five, plus Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus and Gonggong. Gonggong was discovered in 2007 after the dwarf planet name change, but it wasn't confirmed until some new observations from NASA telescopes in 2016. The IAU is still considering proposals on these dwarfish bodies. RELATED STORIES —Watch newly discovered 'interstellar visitor' 3I/ATLAS shoot toward us in first livestream today (July 3) —'A completely new phenomenon': Astronomers spot a planet causing its star to constantly explode —James Webb telescope discovers tentacled 'jellyfish' galaxy swimming through deep space There are at least a handful more objects that have been proposed but need more observations to confirm their size and, therefore, dwarf planet status. And in June 2025, scientists proposed a new possible dwarf planet: 2017 OF201. Astronomers found this particularly faint object by searching through an old pile of data with new advanced algorithms. If you count all of the currently proposed dwarf planets plus the newcomer, that makes eighteen or more dwarf planets in the solar system — and that's just the ones we've seen. There are likely more out there, perhaps even hundreds or thousands, someday to be revealed as our telescopes keep getting better.
