Briley Lewis (she/her) is a freelance science writer and Ph.D. Candidate/NSF Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Astronomy & Astrophysics. Follow her on Twitter @briles_34 or visit her website www.briley-lewis.com.
In the summer, astronomers spotted an airplane-sized asteroid—large enough to potentially destroy a city—on an almost-collision course with Earth. But no one saw the space rock until two days after it had zoomed past our planet. This asteroid, named 2023 NT1, passed by us at only one-fourth of the distance from Earth to the moon. That’s far too close for comfort. Astronomers weren’t going to let this incident go without a post-mortem.
, the “Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System”—four telescopes in Hawaii, Chile, and South Africa—discovered NT1 after the rock flew by. 's entire purpose is to scour the skies for space rocks that might threaten Earth. So with this set of eyes on the sky, how did we miss it? It turns out that Earth has what Brin Bailey, UC Santa Barbara astronomer and lead author on the paper, calls a “blindspot.” Any asteroid coming from the direction of the sun gets lost in the glare of our nearest star.
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