It’s called 2023 EY and it’s as big as a house: An asteroid comes very close to Earth. Next week will be exciting.
An asteroid impact early warning system has spotted an asteroid that will come very close to Earth in the coming week. 2023 EY will zoom past our planet at a distance that is two-thirds the distance from Earth to the Moon: 150,000 miles.
This means that it is not considered potentially dangerous – the trajectory is still too far away from Earth and the asteroid is too small for that. With a diameter of 16 meters, it is about the size of a house, reports “Science Alert”. What can happen when such a celestial body enters the atmosphere became apparent in 2013, when the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded in a sparsely populated region over Siberia and people were injured by the shock wave. Its size is roughly comparable.
On March 13, the asteroid was discovered by an observation station in South Africa, which belongs to the Atlas network (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System). This system was set up to detect potential threats from space as early as possible. It will be closest to Earth at 1:35 a.m. on Friday.
It’s not bright enough to see with the naked eye. However, it is visible through telescopes. The flyby can also be followed online: The Virtual Telescope Project will broadcast the flyby live on Friday from 1 a.m. The images come from a robotic telescope in Ceccano, central Italy.
EY 2023 belongs to the Apollo asteroids. They got their name from 1862 Apollo, an asteroid discovered by the German astronomer Karl Reinmuth in the 1930s. The trajectory is greater than Earth’s orbit around the Sun, but the paths of the asteroids and Earth overlap.