An asteroid discovered before this twelvemonth will make its closest approach to Earth today , coincidentally just as the major planet is see equal parts sidereal day and night . There is no danger of a hit – 2021 NY1 will never get close than the Moon – but the outcome reminds us the Solar System is a dangerous place , and we do n’t love everything that is out there .
2021 NY1is between 130 and 300 metre ( 420 - 990 infantry ) long , making it somewhere between the height of a 30 and 80 story construction . At that size , it is no dinosaur slayer , but it could do some serious local damage if it hit the satellite . It ’s almost certainly larger , for example , than the object this week proposed to have exploded over the Dead Sea , potentiallyinspiring the Biblical storyof the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah .
There ’s no demand for us to watch out for fire and native sulphur from the sky in this guinea pig , though . 2021 NY1 ’s stuffy approaches have been map out up to 2192 and none of them are terribly secretive . In fact , at 2:41 pm UTC today it will be at the closest it ’s going to get to us over that entire menstruation , when it will be just over 1 percent of the space from the Earth to the Sun away , or 1.5 million kilometers ( 932,000 miles ) , four times the distance to the Moon .
The next prison term 2021 NY1 will get tight at all will be 2044 , and it will then be almost four time further away than today , although it will be almost this near in 2105 if anyone carry to be around to see it .
2021 NY1 has an arena that takes it out to well past Mars , almost 2.5 times as far from the Sun as the Earth ever dumbfound . More significantly from our perspective , its near approach to the Sun is 1 pct inside the Earth ’s orbit .
Near - Earth Objects ( NEOs ) like this one make fairly faithful approaches quite frequently . It ’s just a calendar month since aconsiderably largerone conk out by at around twice the distance . However , in that grammatical case , we had do it about it for five years before .
As the name paint a picture , 2021 NY1 was only discovered this year , in June as it happen . It ’s another reminder there are a lot of NEOs out there we do n’t know about , and if one is heading our means we might not get much word of advice .
One way 2021 NY1 stands out from other asteroids is that its close approaching coincides with the equinox , when both hemispheres have12 hour of mean solar day and nightno matter how far you are from the equator . Technically the precise moment of the ( Northern Hemisphere ) autumnal equinox this year is September 22 at 3:20 pmEDT ( 7:20 pm UTC ) , so the asteroid sojourn is about five hr early .
