Less than 24 hours after the Minor Planet Center announced a new asteroid, it said the object was actually Musk's electric car launched into space as payload on a rocket.

The Minor Planet Center seemingly mistook Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster for a small body in space earlier this month, much to the fascination of the billionaire.

What an amateur astronomer recently took to be a newly-discovered asteroid turned out to be a Tesla Roadster voyaging through the cosmos.

The car, launched in 2018 on a SpaceX rocket’s upper stage, is one of many human-made objects in deep space that could potentially be mistaken for natural celestial bodies