A 'Potentially Hazardous' Asteroid Is About To Pass Earth & It's Bigger Than The CN Tower
It's very much giving us Don't Look Up vibes ☄️
We might be living through a real-life Leonardo DiCaprio movie moment next week, and it's all because of a giant asteroid that's going to come very close to the Earth.
NASA says an asteroid by the name of 7482 (1994 PC1) is going to come as close as 1.98 million kilometres (1.23 million miles) to Earth on January 18, so you might want to pull your telescope out.
There's no chance it'll actually hit us of course, but it'll be close enough to meet NASA's definition of a "potentially hazardous asteroid."
This is the closest the asteroid will come to the Earth since January 17, 1933, when NASA estimates it came within 811,000 kilometres (504,000 miles) of our planet.
To put into perspective just how giant this asteroid is, NASA reports that it stands at 3,280 feet, which would make it hundreds of feet taller than the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, or the Empire State Building in New York.
We calculated how tall it would be in comparison to Toronto's CN Tower, which is 1,815 feet. Turns out this asteroid is only a little over 300 feet smaller than 2 CN Towers.
It's not uncommon for asteroids to fly by the Earth, given our solar system has millions of them, but there are about 25,000 that are at least 500 feet wide. If a rock of that size crashed into our planet, NASA says the effects would be devastating.
This rock just happens to be one of those asteroids.
The rather boring name 7482 (1994 PC1) is derived from the date the asteroid was discovered. It's known as an Apollo asteroid because it crosses Earth's orbital path, and this relatively close call is enough to make it "potentially hazardous," according to NASA.
However, this isn't the biggest asteroid to pass by our plane, reported CNN. Back in September of 2017, the asteroid 3122 Florence (1981 ET3) flew by the Earth, and it's estimated to be approximately 3.5-8.9 km (2.2-5.5 miles) wide.
