An asteroid the size of the
Statue of Liberty will zoom past Earth on Tuesday. The asteroid, dubbed 2010
WC9, is about the size of a football field and will fly past Earth at about
28,655 miles per hour, according to EarthSky. To put things in perspective, this asteroid is bigger than the Great
Pyramid of Giza too.
It will come within 126,419
miles of Earth — the closest it has come to our planet in 300 years — though it
is still considered a safe passing distance. The asteroid is expected to whiz
past Earth at 6:05 p.m. E.T. on Tuesday, May 15.
Despite its seemingly large
size, the asteroid will not be visible to the naked eye from Earth. For those
hoping to catch a glimpse of the asteroid, it will be visible with a telescope
for some people.
But even if you don’t have a
telescope, you can still see the asteroid Tuesday night thanks to a livestream
from Northholt Branch Observatories in London. The observatory will stream it
live on Facebook beginning Monday, May 14 at midnight local U.K. time, so
viewers can see 2010 WC9 in space before it begins its approach past Earth.
The asteroid was originally
discovered in 2010 by The Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona, but was then lost
when it “became too faint to see,” according to EarthSky. Astronomers did not
have enough information about 2010 WC9’s orbit to keep track of it until it
reappeared this month.
It is bigger than the
Chelyabinsk meteor, which broke up entering the Earth’s atmosphere five years
ago in 2013. The Chelyabinsk meteor was two to three times smaller than this
week’s 2010 WCJ, but its force upon entering Earth’s atmosphere still broke
windows in multiple Russian cities and hospitalized more than 1,000 people. The
crash was “pegged as 30 to 40 times stronger than the atomic bomb the United
States dropped on Hiroshima,” according to EarthSky.
Before that, the famous
Tunguska meteor broke up over Siberia in 1908 and was thought to be 1,000 times
more powerful than the atomic bomb, flattening more than 80 million trees.