Space & Astronomy

Astronomers taken by surprise as asteroid whizzes past Earth

By T.K. Randall
October 7, 2025 ·  5 comments

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) Known as 2025 TF, this relatively small object - which is thought to be roughly 2 to 3 meters across - passed within a mere 265 miles of the Earth on October 1st, putting it closer to us than many satellites.

Fortunately, it was small enough that if it had been on a collision course, it would have likely burned up in the planet's atmosphere, but that wasn't the main issue - the truth is, nobody had actually seen it at all until it was too late, thus highlighting the danger that such objects still pose.

It wasn't until a few hours later that astronomers spotted it using observations from the Catalina Sky Survey - a NASA-funded mission designed to spot near-Earth objects.

If 2025 TF had been genuinely dangerous, we wouldn't have known about it until it was too late.Monitoring potentially hazardous objects is a task that astronomers take very seriously - at any given time NASA is tracking thousands of asteroids within the general vicinity of our planet.

If one of these poses a threat, the most important thing is to detect it way in advance so that there is time to do something about it (such as sending a spacecraft to deflect it).

Without that advanced warning, though, there's nothing that can be done.

We're just fortunate that, in this case at least, the object in question was very small and didn't hit us.

Source: Live Science | Comments (5)

Tags: Asteroid