A giant meteor is heading right toward us, and we’re all doomed. At least, that’s what a lot of self-identified “experts” are currently shouting about on the internet. According to them, there’s “a massive object that is course correcting towards earth” and will apparently be here in about a decade.
Despite referencing the general idea of evidence, none of them really seem to have any actual sources or can point to where this information is coming from. Many have been referencing a vague classified meeting in Congress due to a discovery made by the James Webb Telescope (which, totally unrelated, actually did recently make some pretty crazy discoveries about how we may completely misunderstand basically everything about the universe).
So, for now, it doesn’t appear that we’re all doomed (at least, not because of a meteor). And even when a Near Earth Object (NEO) occasionally shows up, it almost never does any damage or even really gets close to the Earth — except for a few very special cases.
To celebrate the world not facing imminent destruction, here are five times an asteroid actually got close to Earth…
1908: The Tunguska Event
This is the closest we’ve come to a real-life Armageddon since the dinosaurs were wiped out. On June 30, 1908, an asteroid entered the Earth’s atmosphere before exploding in the sky over Siberia, resulting in a massive explosion that eyewitnesses say looked like a giant fireball. As a result, there were huge forest fires and the explosion caused trees to get blown over. These days, something like that would be a major news story, but back then — and given its remote location and small population — it took almost two decades for any scientists to visit the site.
2004: FU162
On March 31, 2004, a 19-foot-long asteroid was spotted about 4,000 miles from Earth. The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) team observed the rogue object for 44 minutes before it disappeared, making it a lost asteroid. The relatively small size of the asteroid means that even if it had barrelled right to our beloved planet, it wouldn’t have made any real impact due to getting flamed out once it entered our atmosphere. Phew.
2013: Chelyabinsk Meteor
Russia has had some real bad luck when it comes to meteors. On February 15, 2013, a superbolide (that is, a really bright meteor) with a diameter of around 60 feet exploded 97,000 feet over Chelyabinsk Oblast. The massive explosion was brighter than the sun and resulted in 1,491 indirect injuries, mostly due to glass windows being broken by a large shock wave that was caused when most of the object’s energy was absorbed by the atmosphere. This is the only time that injuries caused by a meteor have been confirmed.
Interestingly, another NEO known as 367943 Duende also approached Earth on that same day, though it never got within 17,000 miles of us.
2020: VT4
The 2020 VT4 passed over the South Pacific Ocean on November 13th and came within 230 miles of the Earth’s surface. Wondering how you didn’t hear about this? The reason is pretty simple: This thing was tiny (by asteroid standards). The VT4 is estimated to be between 0.003 to 0.015 kilometers in diameter, which is about the size of a school bus. So even if it had headed toward earth, it almost certainly would have disintegrated during atmospheric entry.
2024: Second Mini Moon
Unlike the most-likely-made-up “course correcting” object that’s become the latest fascination of conspiracy theorists online, this “mini-moon” is very real and has been confirmed by scientists. 2024 PT5 is expected to enter the Earth’s atmosphere later this month and stick around until late November (specifically, November 25th) before it heads back out into the Final Frontier.
Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, co-author of a study about the asteroid that was published in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, said it “will not complete one orbit around Earth, just part of it.”
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