Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you news, big news. Literally big news, not “big” in the sense of the discovery of the Higgs boson or anything quite like that, but BIG.
An asteroid, with a diameter of 400 metres (or, if you’re a fan of the imperial scale of measurement, 1,300 feet) is currently passing by the Earth. The asteroid will reach its closest point to the Earth in its “flyby” at 23:28 GMT, and will be 325,000 kilometres away (or 202,000 miles) from the surface of our planet.
To put this into some perspective, the moon is 384,399 kilometres (238854 miles) away from us. This means that this asteroid will be passing by the earth between the Moon and ourselves, and will be inside the moons orbit.
Whilst we have been assured that the trajectory of the asteroid is not one that would lead to a collision course (and modern astrophysicists can predict the trajectory of these asteroids for many hundreds of years) it is the closest “flyby” of any near Earth object (which is the term given to any object that passes through the trajectory of the Earths’ orbit) since 1976, and we shall not receive another such close visit until the year 2028.
The asteroid (named 2005 YU55) will not be visible to the naked eye astronomer (if it were, we should be worried!!) but any of you with a telescope with a diameter of 15cm or larger should stand a very good chance of seeing the largest asteroid flyby that we have ever known about in advance as it travels across our sky between now and Thursday the Tenth of November.
If I am able, your very own StudentAstro shall attempt to see and photograph the asteroid tonight as it passes across the sky over StudentAstroHQ (my Uni digs).
Happy Asteroid hunting (and stargazing)!!!
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