© Unknown
Get ready for a very close encounter as a house-sized asteroid 2014 UF56 will pass between the Earth and the Moon on Monday. The 15 meter wide space rock will miss our planet at a distance of about 160,000 km (0.4 lunar distances) at 9:12 p.m. UTC. The asteroid was discovered Saturday and despite passing so close to Earth, few if any of us will see the flyby with our eyes in a telescope. At brightest, 2014 UF56 will only reach magnitude +16, as it zips from Scutum constellation through Capricornus.
The asteroid, back in 2012 visited Mars at a distance of about 8 mln km. It will again approach the Earth on Feb. 12, 2018. This will be a very distant fly-by, at about 64 lunar distances.
160,000 km is still a safe distance, but still a very spectacular circumstance, that's why the Virtual Telescope Project will offer a live, online event sharing real-time images of 2014 UF56 with live commentary by their scientific staff. The stream, starting at 7:00 p.m. UTC, will be available at:
virtualtelescope.eu.
None of the known potentially hazardous asteroids is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.
"With 90% of near-Earth asteroids larger than 0.6 miles (1 km) discovered, surveys are now focusing on finding 90% of objects larger than 460 feet (140-m)," amateur astronomer Bob King writes on his
blog. "We have to take it a step at a time because the total number of near-Earth asteroids is in the millions. That's why objects like 2014 UF56 pop up regularly in surveys each month."
Comment: Last week, Comet Siding Spring flew by Mars and we are frequently hearing the
news of asteroids and fireballs. Is there anything happening in the solar system that is contributing to this phenomenon?
Come on Sott quit propagating the lie that there is even an Oort cloud to begin with! All comet's and asteroids are planetary ejecta that was created when the great comet venus passed by mars and an electrical exchange between the two ensued! This event only took 15 minutes to remove nearly five kilometers of mars's northern hemisphere and deposited whatever didn't escape into space back onto the southern hemisphere! the Rosetta mission bears this out quite wonderfully! That frikkin comet is a space rock that has no ice whatsoever! Just wait until they try to land the probe into the so called icy surface,it will fail miserably I promise!! The basics of the electric universe is that our solar system was not formed by accretion in a swirl of gas and dust as stars are not made of either,they are made of plasma.The planets were formed from other dwarf stars that came too close to our sun,they are all captured planets otherwise the gas giants would be located much much closer to it's parent star,our sun! Now go from that little bit of information right there and you'll have the keys to the kingdom so to speak.The Keppler mission shows this to be true,most planets stay close to their parent stars,yet in our solar system they do not except the 3 rocky planets which were born from either Saturn or Jupiter when they were M-dwarf stars! Venus today is a classic example of a very young planets in case you didn't know!!