“People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us,” one astronomer said.
Reality check: Not everything revolves around the endless reports of Trump — Republican atrocities.
On Thursday, July 25, an asteroid dubbed “Asteroid 2019 OK” passed within 45,000 miles of the Earth — the moon is 238,856 miles away! 2019 OK was not spotted because it came from the direction of the Sun and travelling faster than most asteroids.
This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had long been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post.
According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”
As it approached Earth, the asteroid was traveling at about 24 kilometers per second, he said, or nearly 54,000 mph. By contrast, other recent asteroids that flew by Earth clocked in between 4 and 19 kilometers per second (8,900 to 42,500 mph).
“People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”
