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There is only one month left on Halloween and fans of the party have already stocked up on fake spider webs and vampire teeth. But Halloween 2018 will bring an unusual new visitor: a ghostly asteroid.
An asteroid, called 2015 TB145, looks, from certain angles, to a human skull, with dark and deep orbits. He will return to Earth a few days after Halloween on November 11th.
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The last time the object was seen from Earth was in October 2015. It drew a lot of fans from its Halloween flyover, and NASA nicknamed it "The Great Pumpkin". The comet also has a bunch of other nicknames, like "Spooky", and the Halloween asteroid, but the coolest alias must be "the asteroid skull".
NAIC-Arecibo / NSF
If the strange shape and timing of the asteroid are not enough to make you forget, the fact that it is made up of the remains of a dead comet could. Vishnu Reddy, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said in a press release in 2015:
"We found that the object reflects about 6% of the light it receives from the sun.This looks like fresh asphalt." While here on Earth, we think that it's quite dark, it's brighter than a typical comet that only reflects 3 to 5% of the light.This suggests that this could be comet origin – but as it does not have a comet. There is no obvious coma, the conclusion is that it's a dead comet. "
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / GSSR / NRAO / AUI / NSF
And although some outlets asked if the asteroid was a "catastrophic threat" in 2015, it flew at a close but safe distance of about 300,000 miles from Earth. This year, the safety distance between the Earth and the Moon will be about 105 times greater than that of the Moon, which is about 25 million kilometers.
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Tags fly Ground Halloween Rock shaped skull Space
