A “planet killer” asteroid the scale of Mount Everest will cross close to Earth tonight
a An asteroid the size of a mountain The probe, nicknamed the “Killer Planet,” will attain its closest strategy to Earth in additional than a century on Thursday.
The asteroid, formally generally known as Asteroid (415029) 2011 UL21, will cross near Earth simply after 9pm BST (4pm EST) on June 27, touring at a velocity of practically 26 kilometres per second.
NASA has categorised the rock as a “probably hazardous asteroid,” although it poses no menace to Earth for no less than the following thousand years. In keeping with the open-source House Reference challenge, the asteroid is “concerning the measurement of Mount Everest” and can come very shut in 2089.
A free reside stream of the house rock shall be accessible on the Digital Telescope Venture web site at 9pm GMT on Thursday, displaying the view from the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Chicano, Italy.
The asteroid will even be seen by means of an everyday telescope on the nights of June 28 and 29, when it should seem at its peak brightness.
The European House Company famous in an alert that “asteroid (415029) 2011 UL21 will cross close to Earth on June 27, at 20:14 UTC (22:14 Central European Summer time Time).”
“At 2,310 meters in diameter, it’s bigger than 99 p.c of all recognized near-Earth objects, however it poses no menace to Earth and can cross greater than 17 instances farther than the Moon.”
It’s one in every of two near-Earth asteroids scheduled to cross by us this week, with the newly found asteroid 2024 MK scheduled to cross by on June 29.
The second asteroid is barely smaller, with a diameter starting from 122 to 256 meters, though it should cross a lot nearer than the primary.
Astronomers first found asteroid 2024 MK on June 16, 2024, once they calculated that it will cross at a distance of 77% of the gap between the Moon and Earth.
