A massive asteroid 455176 (1999 VF22) just swung past the Earth in the early hours of Tuesday. It was closest to the Earth's surface at 2.54 am, when it was just 3.3 million miles (5.4 million km) away or almost 14 times the distance between us and the moon.
The asteroid is believed to have made the closest approach to Earth in the last 100 years. Although it passed by Earth at a safe distance, it is still considered a “potentially hazardous asteroid".
It last visited Earth in 2020. The object came close to Earth at a staggering speed of 90,360 kilometers per hour.
As per reports, it was close enough for astronomers to study it using radar. The Virtual Telescope Project even aired a live stream of it.
A massive asteroid 455176 (1999 VF22) just swung past the Earth in the early hours of Tuesday. It was closest to the Earth's surface at 2.54 am, when it was just 3.3 million miles (5.4 million km) away or almost 14 times the distance between us and the moon.
The asteroid is believed to have made the closest approach to Earth in the last 100 years. Although it passed by Earth at a safe distance, it is still considered a “potentially hazardous asteroid".
It last visited Earth in 2020. The object came close to Earth at a staggering speed of 90,360 kilometers per hour.
As per reports, it was close enough for astronomers to study it using radar. The Virtual Telescope Project even aired a live stream of it.
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The asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Catalina Sky Survey, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Small-Body Database. It is because of this that it was named 1999 VF22. Its next close approach will be in 128 years on 23 February 2150.
The VF22 asteroid is a rounded space rock and has an average size of 1,017 feet (310 meters) in diameter. It often passes close to planets such as Mars, Venus and Mercury.
The Solar System is full of asteroids: chunks of rock much smaller than a planet. By looking at asteroids through telescopes and analysing the spectrum of light they reflect, scientists can classify most of them into three groups: C-type (which contain a lot of carbon), M-type (which contain a lot of metals), and S-type (which contain a lot of silica).
When an asteroid’s orbit brings it into a collision with Earth, depending on how big it is, we might see it as a meteor (a shooting star) streaking across the sky as it burns up in the atmosphere. If some of the asteroid survives to reach the ground, we might find the remaining piece of rock later: these are called meteorites.
Most of the asteroids we see orbiting the Sun are the dark-coloured C-types. Based on their spectrum, C-types seem very similar in makeup to a kind of meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites. These meteorites are rich in organic and volatile compounds such as amino acids, and may have been the source of the seed proteins for making life on Earth.
However, while around 75 per cent of asteroids are C-types, only 5 per cent of meteorites are carbonaceous chondrites.
