Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth

lmcl writes "New Scientist reports that an asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre. The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by."

Comments

shotgun effect. (two in a few days)

[Stephen Samuel]

Both of them were were on the 27'th One hit the earth, the other didn't. I'm guessing something along the lines of the cloud of a shattered asteroid / comet. To have those two events occur litteraly within hours of each other is hard to dismiss as a coincidence.

I would also note that the Indian event also appears to have consisted of at least two pieces (one of which is said to have done minor damage in a different village). I'm guessing that there are more pieces out there (smaller, perhaps, but out there).

Not closest - Grand Teton, 1972

[B.D.Mills]

80,000 km is not the closest. How about the Grand Teton Meteor of 1972? This one was seen in the US and Canada as a bright daylight fireball. It was very close - about 50 km - but did not hit. Instead, it burned through the atmosphere and went off back into space.

Then there's this one, which is believed to be a meteor that was put into Earth orbit on the first pass, then re-entered 100 minutes later after orbiting the Earth once.

Re:When it rains. . .

[BrianH]

(a ball of hydrogen which never got quite big enough to ignite, but which plays binary to the sun)

25 years ago this theory may have been worth spending time on, but technology has done a pretty good job of ruling it out since then (nothing is impossible, but its presence is highly unlikely).

The theory that a brown dwarf or Uranus to Jupiterian-sized planet could be orbiting beyond Pluto in a slow or elliptical orbit invisible to ground based visible light scopes is believable, but astronomy has moved well beyond visible light. We've scanned the sky in X-Ray, infrared, radio, and gamma ray, and haven't found ANYTHING resembling another planet or nearby star. Planets, especially gas giants, tend to be noisy and easily visible by radio, and ALL planetary bodies have some kind of infrared signature. If there were anything out there of any appreciable size, we'd have seen some sign of it by now.