An asteroid is due to pass the Earth on Wednesday, flying by at a distance a little more than that of the moon's orbit.
The asteroid, named 2023 HV5, is forecast by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) to pass by the Earth at a distance of 1.1 lunar distances, or 1.1 times the distance between the Earth and moon.
The moon is around 238,900 miles away from us, meaning that 1.1 lunar distances is equivalent to about 262,790 miles. This may sound like a gargantuan distance on a human scale, but in terms of even the distances in our solar system, this will be a close miss. Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor, only comes as close to us as 38 million miles away at its closest point.
2023 HV5 is thought to be around 42 feet across and is expected to pass us at a speed of about 8.9 km/s, or around 20,000 mph: ten times as fast as a speeding bullet.
The solar system is full of asteroids, which are defined as small chunks of rock orbiting the sun, often left over from the formation of the planets. NASA estimates there are over 1,100,000 asteroids in our solar system, with more being discovered every year.
"Asteroids are 'bits of a planet that didn't happen' that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Asteroid Belt. However, as they are relatively small, asteroids can be disturbed quite easily, so they can develop orbits that cross those of planets," Jay Tate, the director of the Spaceguard Center observatory in the U.K., previously told Newsweek.
Asteroids come flying past the Earth and other inner solar system objects because of interactions with Jupiter, sending them careening out of their usual orbits.
"We believe they formed in the asteroid belt and got ejected by impact, or their orbits were destabilized due to the presence of Jupiter resonances in the belt," Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, told Newsweek in October.
Asteroids are classified as "near-Earth objects" (NEOs) if they pass within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit, with NASA having identified more than 31,000 of these NEOs. A smaller sub-catergory of NEO are called "potentially hazardous objects," of which 2,300 have been identified. These objects are defined by coming within 4.6 million miles of Earth's orbit, and also measuring greater than 460 feet in diameter.
"The 'potentially hazardous' designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid's orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, previously told Newsweek.
Because of its small size, 2023 HV5 is only considered an NEO, not a potentially hazardous object. CNEOS data states that it is extremely unlikely that it will collide with the Earth, with a collision probability of 0.00024.
Potentially hazardous objects are also extremely unlikely to hit the Earth: CNEOS shows that no potentially hazardous object currently has any viable chance of colliding with Earth over the next 100 years.
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Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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