Last Friday (27), an asteroid - the largest to pass close to Earth this year - passed by our planet and left rulers worried. According to NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, the "potentially hazardous" asteroid had a diameter of 1.1 miles long and at least 3,280 feet wide. He was seen crossing the Earth at 9 am. Check out this article for more details about the dangerous asteroid that approached Earth.
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The asteroid, officially named 1989 JA, is approximately four times the size of the Empire State Building. This asteroid would be catastrophic if it collided with Earth, but it was at a safe distance of 2.5 million kilometers. For citizens of countries in the southern hemisphere, this asteroid could be seen using small magnifying instruments, such as telescopes and binoculars.
The classification of a PHA, that is, of a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid, is done as “any object passing the Earth at a distance of less than 0.05 astronomical units”, where 1ua = distance Earth – Sun.
For many people, categorizing this asteroid as potentially dangerous might seem confusing, but there's a reason. This label is given to any type of space object that is close enough to Earth, that is, less than 20 times the distance from the moon to the planet. With this, it is possible to define whether an asteroid is 'close' enough to enter the PHA category.
Although the asteroid collision seen this week did not occur, it is still "conceivable" that over the course of many centuries, if not millennia, the sphere of this object could evolve enough to collide with the Earth. This makes it dangerous in the long run.
