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Unlike that false alarm in Hawaii, this potentially cataclysmic piece of news is real: an asteroid between 22 and 68 meters in diameter
is going to swing past Earth on
January 23 at around 12,300 miles an hour (around Mach 16).
It's going to come within 1.1 million miles of Earth, but it's unclear whether its trajectory will cause it to hit Earth or fly past harmlessly.The asteroid, named 2018 AJ, is just one of several asteroids that have suddenly popped up on NASA's radar without warning-
the last one was 2017 YD7, which was spotted December 28 and flew past Earth on January 3.
The scary thing about these rocks is that once we spotted them, there's very little we can do to stop them: according to
NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, we'd need a few
decades of advance warning to deal with an asteroid 100 meters in size or larger. From there, a couple options open up, including knocking the asteroid off course with a "kinetic impactor" or using a "gravity tractor" to change its trajectory.
Comment: UPDATE: Wed, 17 Jan. 2018 (18.15 CET)
USGS has registered this event as a M2.0 earthquake with the epicenter at New Haven, just north of Detroit in Michigan. The American Meteor Society (AMS) has received almost 400 reports of the event. The flashing light and loud boom felt across Michigan and seen as far away as New York City and parts of Canada on Tuesday night was a meteoroid entering the atmosphere, according to NASA.
A post on the NASA Meteor Watch Facebook page, said the meteoroid traveled northwest from the Brighton area to the Howell area, citing the American Meteor Society's website. The 1 a.m. post read:
UPDATE: Sat, 20th Jan. 2018
The Daily Mail reports meteorite hunters have found fragments: