Whew … a gigantic asteroid has just zoomed bitingly on the Earth



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A huge asteroid the size of Big Ben crossed the Earth tonight, but luckily left our fragile planet totally intact.

The rock was called MD8 2013 and is a "close to Earth object" that swept at 17:55 UK time.

It is thought to be up to 86 meters long and 30,418 miles an hour.

Fortunately, the 2013 MD8 did not come to hit us and moved away from the Earth to continue its solitary journey through the void.

One day, a big asteroid will reach the Earth and you will not want to approach the impact zone anymore (Photo: Getty)

The asteroid was within 3.5 million kilometers of the planet, about 15 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.

Fortunately, there is currently no space stone colliding with the house of mankind.

In a statement, NASA said: "NASA knows no asteroid or comet currently colliding with Earth. The probability of a major collision is therefore very low.

"In fact, as far as we can judge, no large object is likely to hit Earth at any time in the next few centuries."

A view of the devastation caused by the Tunguska explosion

Humanity has witnessed a major impact on asteroids over the last century.

The mysterious "Tunguska event" was the biggest asteroid impact in the history of history. It caused an explosion a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

In 1908, 80 million trees were felled over an area of ​​800 square miles hidden deep within the Siberian forest when a 190-meter-wide meteor crashed into the Earth.

If the object that caused this devastation hit a populated area, it could have killed millions of people and razed a city.

Asteroids represent a major threat to human civilization (photo: Getty)

In a research article published on Arxiv last year, a team of scientists said that our planet was hit by slightly larger objects every 1,000 years – although they also claimed that the The impact of a smaller object could occur between 100 and 500 years.

"There is still a potentially significant difference in the frequency of the impacts of the size of Tunguska and Chelyabinsk," they wrote, also referring to an incident in 2013 that left 400 injured.

Although the impact of an object the size of Tunguska does not erase humanity, it can kill millions of people.

It is also difficult to protect yourself from these smaller rocks because they can sneak onto our planet and can only be detected just before we hit.

The tauric meteor shower is believed to be the source of the meteor that exploded in the sky above the Stony Tunguska River in 1908.

In 2017, scientists have warned that asteroids big enough to cause "continental" damage may be hiding in a new Tauridae limb.

Researchers from the Czech Academy of Sciences, writing in Astronomy and Astrophysics, warn that an unknown branch of the Taurides could harbor asteroids up to "several hundred meters in diameter".

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