A colossal asteroid nearly as large as the Great Pyramid of Giza made a close pass by Earth, according to NASA.
The asteroid, designated 2024 JZ, hurtled past the planet at 56,000 miles per hour, which is about 65 times faster than the speed of a bullet.
Despite the asteroid’s impressive size of 394 feet long and high velocity, NASA experts assured the public that there is no cause for alarm. The space rock completed its flyby at a safe distance of 2.6 million miles from Earth.
While that distance might seem vast on a human scale, it’s relatively close in astronomical terms, prompting NASA to classify the asteroid as a ’near-Earth object’ (NEO).
“NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood,” NASA said in a statement. “Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most of the rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.”
NEOs orbit within about 27.8 million miles of Earth’s orbit. An object is deemed “potentially hazardous” if it approaches Earth closer than 4.65 million miles and measures more than 460 feet in diameter.
A smaller asteroid, 2024 JT3, is set to pass even closer to Earth, skimming by 12,000 miles away. However, Juan Luis Cano from the European Space Agency’s Planetary Defense Office has stated that Earth is in no danger from the close encounters, the Daily Mail reported.
Such events, while seemingly alarming, are in fact routine. The European Space Agency describes large objects like 2024 JZ navigating through Earth’s orbit as a “very frequent event.” Most of the celestial visitors harmlessly burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, occasionally gracing the night skies as shooting stars.
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