“Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered on 27 December 2024. As of 10 February 2025, it has an approximately 98 percent chance of safely passing Earth on 22 December 2032. Astronomers are working to reduce our uncertainty about the asteroid’s orbit and rule out any impact risk, but it will fade from view from Earth in a few months’ time, and a small chance of impact may persist until it becomes visible again in 2028. The chance of impact is very slim, and the asteroid is small enough that the effects of any potential impact would be on a local scale, but the situation is significant enough to warrant the attention of the global planetary defence community,” says the ESA.

“Astronomers around the world are using powerful telescopes to measure the asteroid’s orbit as accurately as possible. But knowing its orbit will only tell us if the asteroid could impact Earth, not how significant an impact could be. To accurately assess the hazard posed by asteroid 2024 YR4, we need a more precise estimate of its size. Our current estimate, 40—90 m, has not changed much since the asteroid was first discovered in December 2024, despite many follow-up observations.”

“This is because astronomers are currently limited to studying the asteroid via the visible light it reflects from the Sun. In general, the brighter the asteroid, the larger it is, but this relationship strongly depends on how reflective the asteroid’s surface is. 2024 YR4 could be 40 m across and very reflective, or 90 m across and not very reflective. It is very important that we improve our size estimate for 2024 YR4: the hazard represented by a 40 m asteroid is very different from that of a 90 m asteroid,” the blog post continued. CBS News reports that if it does hit, the impact would be somewhere in the middle latitudes, anywhere from the Arabian Sea to Venezuela.