© Reuters/NASA
Moscow University's robotic telescope has discovered a massive asteroid that could potentially hit Earth in the future. If such a collision happens, the explosion would be 1,000 more powerful the Chelyabinsk meteorite explosion in 2013.
An automatic telescope installed in Russia's Caucasus Mountains, near the city of Kislovodsk, first spotted the newly discovered space rock, dubbed 2014 UR116. The
asteroid is estimated to be 370 meters in diameter, which is bigger than the size of the notorious Apophis asteroid.
Once Russian astronomers saw the new space object, they passed the
data to colleagues at the Minor Planet Center of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. That means many observatories around the world closely scrutinized 2014 UR116, which helped to calculate the object's preliminary orbit.
2014 UR116's orbit is fluctuating because it also passes close to Venus and Mars, and the gravitational pull of these planets can also influence the asteroid's trajectory.
When a
meteorite exploded in the skies above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013, the energy of the explosion was estimated to be equivalent to 300-500 kilotons of TNT. But the Chelyabinsk meteorite was relatively small, about 17 meters in diameter and it disintegrated with a blast at an altitude of over 20 kilometers.
Comment: There was another fireball seen over Chicago just one hour later:
...and another in Japan on the same day: