SALT LAKE CITY — Scientists are saying a “city-killer” asteroid came “uncomfortably close” to Earth, and they only found out about it at the last minute.
“It snuck up on us pretty quickly,” said Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, according to The Washington Post. “People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”
The asteroid followed a path that brought it about 45,000 miles close to Earth, which is less than one-fifth of the distance between the Earth and the moon.
Alan Duffy, a lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post that the distance was “uncomfortably close.”
He said he received a number of calls from reporters asking about the asteroid, named "Asteroid 2019 OK." He wasn’t sure “why everyone was so alarmed.”
“I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” he said. When he looked up the data on the asteroid, he was shocked, according to The Washington Post.
Telescopes only noticed the asteroid a few days ago, and it was only in the last 24 hours that scientists realized how close to Earth it was coming, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
“It’s impressively close. I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet. It’s a pretty big deal,” Brown told The Sydney Morning Herald. “(If it hit Earth) it makes the bang of a very large nuclear weapon — a very large one.”
“It’s a city-killer asteroid,” he continued. “But because it’s so small, it’s incredibly hard to see until right at the last minute. It’s threading tightly between the lunar orbit. Definitely too close for comfort.”
If that’s not enough, here’s a kicker for you — the asteroid was about 57 to 130 meters in diameter. For comparison, the rock that killed the dinosaurs was 16 kilometers across.