A huge asteroid capable of worldwide devastation will visit earth this Christmas, giving the planet a wide berth.
According to astronomers a massive piece of rock will safely whizz past during the holiday season. They announced on Thursday that we will be safely visited by a celestial body capable of inflicting global environmental change.
Scientists assume that the ‘Christmas Eve’ asteroid is not an ‘Earth-grazer’ due to its relative distance from someone standing on the earth.
AFP reports:
The massive space rock, about two kilometres (1.2 miles) in length, will cruise by our planet about 28 times farther than the distance between Earth and the Moon, Mark Bailey, director of the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, told AFP.
“It’s not what you would call an Earth-grazer or anything like that,” he said — contradicting media reports that it could pass near enough to trigger earthquakes and volcanoes.
“It’s at a distance such that you could expect several such encounters with objects of that sort of size every year — so maybe every couple of months you would get one coming that close, and of the same size.”