Bolide over southeast U.S. and Asteroid 2024 YR4 update for Asteroid Day and Meteor Watch Day

Happy International Asteroid Day, the younger but paradoxically more established version of Apophis Day! It's also National Meteor Watch Day, so I'm beginning today's post with a spectacular meteor, which CNN reported as Fireball flies across the sky and causes sonic boom on Friday.

A ‘daytime fireball’ was caught on video in the sky over South Carolina – causing a sonic boom, according to the American Meteor Society. CNN has reached out to emergency management officials in North Carolina and Tennessee, as well as NASA for comment.

That's quite the meteor! Good thing it mostly created a natural fireworks show, maybe some property damage, and no injuries.

Now for two updates on Asteroid 2024 YR4, beginning with Global News reporting Asteroid now poses real threat of hitting Moon, NASA warns.

An asteroid once considered a threat to Earth is now on a potential collision course to the Moon.

NASA says the object has just over a four per cent chance of impacting the Moon, seven years from now.

Though the odds may seem small, scientists warn that the damage could be significant.

Vincent McAviney reports on why the space agency says this risk is no longer trivial.

That sounds alarming, if still unlikely. The European Space Agency was a lot calmer in From threat to no sweat: Asteroid 2024 YR4.

How did asteroid 2024 YR4 go from being the riskiest asteroid ever detected to posing no real threat? First spotted in December 2024, its impact risk initially soared to 2.8%, surpassing previous record-holder Apophis. But thanks to refined observations from our Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre and other institutions, its risk quickly dropped to just 0.001% within days. This dramatic shift follows a well-known pattern—asteroid impact probabilities often rise before plummeting as more data becomes available. Now, nearly all possible impact scenarios have been ruled out, and 2024 YR4 has been safely removed from our risk list.

Nothing about a possible impact with the Moon, but NASA's planetary defense blog lists that probability as 4.3%, as Global News reported.

That's a wrap for June's blogging. Stay tuned for Canada Day to begin July.