Head fuck(ed)

Are we about to be obliterated by a skull-shaped asteroid this Halloween?
By Finn Blythe | Current affairs | 25 October 2018

Above image: An artist’s impression of TB145 / Jose Antonio Pena/Since

Hold on to your pumpkins because this year’s Halloween comes with a bit of a twist. An asteroid shaped like a human skull – yes, that’s a grinning human skull – is set to pass by Earth for the second time.

It’s been described as a Halloween Death Comet, the The Great Pumpkin, and, ‘That creepy AF giant skull in the sky’, but officially it’s known as TB145, having earned its spooky Halloween nicknames after it first flew past Earth on October 31st, 2015.

According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (the sort of people you ought to be taking seriously), Asteroid 2015 TB145 was first discovered in 2015 after it passed within 301,986 miles (486,000 km) of Earth on Halloween. To put that in some kind of context, the moon is 384,400 km away from us, meaning said meteorite was well within the ‘too-close-for-comfort’ range.

This year will see the 625m long lump (which scientists believe to be the remains of a dead comet) of rock hurtle right by us once more for Halloween, at the more acceptable distance of around 24 million miles (38 million km) from our planet. That’s about a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the sun. This sort of thing should by no means be taken for granted too, the next time 2015 TB 145 approaches Earth won’t be until 2082, when it will pass at about a third of the distance between the Earth and the sun.

For those of you into your apocalyptic fantasies, you can mark the following potentially life-ending events into your diaries now. According to research conducted by the Max Planck Society, an asteroid names 1999 AN10 will pass 185,911 miles (299,196 km) from Earth on Aug. 7, 2027. On April 13, 2029, an asteroid named 99942 Apophis, after the Egyptian god of evil, will pass by Earth at a distance of only 23,239 miles (37,400 km), about a tenth of the distance from the Earth to the moon. Yikes.


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