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If you were planning to hold a Halloween party on October 31st, you may want to reprogram. A very special asteroid will soon be appearing, but as a terrible visitor who does not really know why you have invited him, he will appear almost two weeks late.
The 2015 TB145 asteroid was discovered in (you guessed it) in 2015, and its initial appearance near Earth was truly remarkable. The rock, which looks a lot like a giant human skull, has been revealed about 300,000 miles from Earth, just for Halloween. This time, it will be late for the occasion and also a little further.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is one of the few organizations to monitor objects at a significant distance from the Earth, predicts that TB145 2015 will be about 24 million kilometers from Earth this year. on November 11th. .
This is far from the proximity of the object passed in 2015, but it is still close enough for astronomers to use the flyby to study the asteroid in more detail than it would otherwise be possible. This will be important since, as LiveScience note, the space rock will take a long hiatus from the Earth's flybys after this year, appearing closer to our planet before after 2080.
The asteroid, which has a somewhat unusual oblong shape, was captured on an image by astronomers who first noted its skull appearance. The haunting image of rock soon took flight, dubbed "comet of death", "asteroid of death" and "the asteroid of Halloween" because of its falling flight in 2015.
It seems that humanity is safe and that the strange rock does not threaten humanity in the near future. Even if it had an impact on Earth one day or another, it is not a particularly large asteroid, measuring only between 600 and 700 meters wide. A true "planet killer", like the rock that wiped out dinosaurs, should be about 14 to 15 times that size.
Image Source: J. A. Peñas / SINC
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