An asteroid is expected to come extremely close to the Earth on Thursday, skimming past us as it flies off into the cosmos.
The asteroid, named 2024 GJ2, will zip past our planet at a distance of 0.00012 astronomical units, or around 11,100 miles. While this may still sound like a long way away, it is very close on a cosmic scale, equivalent to only 4 percent of the distance between the Earth and the moon, which is about 238,900 miles away. 2024 GJ2 is thought to be between 7.2 and 16.4 feet across, making it no larger than a giraffe.
Most asteroids are found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, with some flung into the inner solar system because of Jupiter's gravity. Over 1 million asteroids are in our solar system, according to NASA's calculations. Around 31,000 of these asteroids are classified as near-Earth objects, or NEOs, because they are less than 30 million miles away from Earth.
Some asteroids are also considered potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) or potentially hazardous objects (PHOs), and NASA is tracking around 2,350 of them. These are defined as being closer to the Earth than 4.6 million miles, and they are larger than 460 feet in diameter.
PHOs also need to have a magnitude of 22.0 or less. A smaller or negative magnitude indicates a brighter object, with the sun having a magnitude of -27 and the full moon about -13. Objects with magnitudes lower than +6 are visible to the naked eye.
Because of its smaller size, 2024 GJ2 is considered just an NEO. It will fly past the Earth at a speed of around 32,167 mph, nearly 18 times the speed of a bullet. The impact probability, or its chances of hitting our planet, is extremely low, at 0.00000018, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies.
If a larger PHA asteroid were to hit the Earth head-on, however, it could be catastrophic for humankind.
"An asteroid 100-200 meters [330-650 feet] in diameter would cause a regional disaster, taking out a small country but with the resulting global consequences in terms of the global economy and globalization," Jay Tate, director of the U.K.'s Spaceguard Centre observatory, previously told Newsweek.
Thankfully, the chances of a large asteroid hitting Earth any time soon are immensely small, so you can sleep soundly at night.
"The odds are 1/~100,000 years, depending on size," Gretchen Benedix, an astrogeologist at Australia's Curtin University, told Newsweek.
This essentially means that in the next 1,000 years there is a 0.001 percent chance of a large asteroid hitting us.
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