It was about to crash into the earth, and fortunately, we survived!
A previously detected Asteroid, which holds a supermassive mass, recently had a close encounter with Earth. The supermassive Space rock, which is almost half of a large Boston building, gave the earth the closest miss, two days after its discovery. On Monday morning, the asteroid, which is big enough to wipe out our whole Mother Planet, took a close shave within half distance between Earth and Moon.
The asteroid, with an enthralling name – ‘2017 AG13’, passed by the Earth, which brought the celestial object within the half the distance from Earth to the moon. The extraordinary phenomena took place on Monday morning, at t 7:47 a.m. EST (1247 GMT). During the incident, the moon was positioned nearly 239,000 miles, or 385,000 kilometers, from Earth.
‘2017 AG13’, which was discovered on 7th January, just two days before its close-shave with earth, is believed to be between 11 to 34 meters or 36 and 111 feet wide. According to the cosmonauts at the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the asteroid is almost equal to the mass of a mid-sized Boston commercial building. It is quite smaller than the object, which blasted over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, back in February 2013, leaving over 1,000 people injured.
As said by an official of International Astronomical Union, such space rocks are comparatively small in size and this characteristic make then hard to be noticed. Usually, the asteroids reside far away from Earth, but they can be extremely treacherous if they crumbled or punch the ground near a town.
2017 AG13 was detected on 7th January, by the researchers from the University of Arizona-based Catalina Sky Survey. During the initial observations, the object was believed to take 347 Earth days to take a complete circle of the sun – on a course which is much more cryptic than that of Earth. It means, AG13 gets nearer to earth’s star to around 0.55 AU (Astronomical Units) and as beyond as 1.36 AU.
According to Gareth Williams, the Associate Director of the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, “Such incidents take place on rare occasions and if it happens over populated areas, it can be risky, and hence we need to be aware of such objects.”