Perhaps don't make plans for Valentines Day in 2046 - an asteroid may be hitting the Earth. Boffins have announced they are keeping an eye on a newly-discovered space rock that may smash into our planet - and have pinpointed 14 February as the likely closest approach.
NASA said: "We've been tracking a new asteroid named 2023 DW that has a very small chance of impacting Earth in 2046. Often when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future.
"Orbit analysts will continue to monitor asteroid 2023 DW and update predictions as more data comes in." The space agency say the asteroid has an average diameter of 49m and is currently 0.12 astronomical unit (au) - or 11 billion miles - from Earth.
One au (astronomical unit) is approximately the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. However, if the asteroid does hit it would not likely cause a global catastrophe. In 1908, a similarly-sized asteroid of about 50–60 metres (160–200 ft) exploded over a sparsely populated Eastern Siberian forest.
It caused a 12-megaton explosion that flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi). Eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the event.
On a larger scale, the asteroid thought to have wiped out dinosaurs was believed to have been between 10 and 15 kilometres wide.
The impact site, known as the Chicxulub crater, is centred on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. In September 2022, NASA crashed the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into the Dimorphos asteroid.
The mission aim was to test a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects (NEOs) and assess how much a spacecraft impact deflects an asteroid through its transfer of momentum when hitting the asteroid head-on.
