A car-sized asteroid will cross at about half the space between Earth and the moon tonight (Dec. 6), concluding a busy week for asteroid watchers everywhere in the world.
The roughly 15-foot-wide (4.6 meters) asteroid, designated 2024 XS2, will make its closest strategy to Earth for the following 10 years tonight at 9:47 p.m. EST (0247 GMT on Saturday, Dec. 7).
2024 XS2 will cross simply 122,000 miles (196,000 kilometers) away from our planet and shall be shiny sufficient to be seen in long-exposure images taken by novice telescopes, in response to TheSkyLive. (For comparability: The moon orbits Earth at an common distance of about 238,900 miles, or 384,500 km).
Nevertheless, if you happen to’re within the Northern Hemisphere, the viewing circumstances will not be nice: The asteroid will make its closest strategy whereas traversing the southern sky between two constellations, the Dolphinfish and Reticulum.
Associated: What are asteroids?
2024 XS2, found in March of this yr, belongs to the Apollo class of asteroids, probably the most quite a few group of near-Earth area rocks, which strategy the solar nearer than Earth does, crossing its orbit alongside the best way.
Tonight’s shut strategy takes place solely three days after a 28-inch-wide (70 centimeters) area rock exploded right into a spectacular fireball above Siberia. A number of photographers within the metropolis of Oleminsk, close to which items of this area rock are believed to have landed, captured the occasion, which occurred at 1:15 a.m. native time on Dec. 4 (11.15 am EST on Dec. 3).
The influence of that asteroid, since named C0WEPC5, was the fourth in 2024 and eleventh general that had been efficiently predicted and noticed based mostly on earlier orbital calculations.
A much larger space rock, as soon as thought a possible hazard to Earth, safely missed the planet solely hours after C0WEPC5 slammed into us. That area rock, the greater than 1,000-foot-wide (300 meters) 2020 XR, made its closest strategy to the planet on Dec. 4 at 12:27 a.m. EST (0527 GMT), passing 1.37 million miles (2.2 million km) — about six Earth-moon distances — away from Earth.
Astronomers at the moment monitor about 34,000 near-Earth asteroids, which pass within 28 million miles (45 million km) of Earth’s orbit. A near-Earth asteroid wider than 460 toes (140 m) that approaches nearer than 4,650,000 miles (7,480,000 km) to Earth’s orbit is deemed potentially hazardous. Astronomers at the moment monitor about 2,300 doubtlessly hazardous asteroids.
