The end of the world is not yet nigh
This Halloween just got a whole lot scarier with the discovery of a huge asteroid hurtling towards Earth. The space rock was discovered less than a fortnight ago by astronomers using the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii.
With the asteroid expected to come within the 7,500,000 km threshold of proximity to Earth, it has been classified as a potentially hazardous object. NASA is confident, however, that the asteroid will fly past our planet some 499,000 km away, while cruising at speeds of over 126,000km per hour.
Despite missing Earth, experts monitoring the space debris estimate the fly-by will be the closest an asteroid has come to our home planet in close to a decade. NASA expects it to be the largest known cosmic body to get near our planet until 2027. The new found asteroid is 28 times bigger than the Chelyabinsk meteor that penetrated the atmosphere over Russia in February 2013.
Happy Halloween!