There are, as it turns out, a series of asteroids that fly relatively close, astronomically speaking, to the Earth. And researchers in Arizona recently observed one of the smallest near-earth asteroids — they found it reflects more than half the sunlight that falls on it, making it one of the brightest in history.

Vishnu Reddy was one of those working on that. He’s a faculty member at the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona and author of a paper published in The Astronomical Journal about this. Reddy is asked that when talking about near-Earth asteroids, is it what the name would imply?