This isn’t the only small asteroid to pop up on astronomers’ radars recently. By speeding it up, however, this video highlights the drama of the moment, which likely won’t happen again this century, Stone writes. It took about 11 minutes for Earth to eclipse the speedy asteroid. The asteroid is perfectly tracked: it is the sharp dot in the center, marked with two white segments.to our knowledge, this is the first video ever of a complete eclipse of an asteroid. The robotic mount tracked the extremely fast (570″/minute) apparent motion of the asteroid, so stars are trailing. Using a robotic instrument dubbed “Elena,” the researchers recorded the asteroid as it flew towards our planet and passed into our shadow-a tough shot considering how how fast the rock was flying, Stone reports.Īs Virtual Telescope Project researcher Gianluca Masi explains in a blog post:
The news of its arrival sent astronomers scrambling to catch a glimpse of the asteroid before the speedy rock flew by.Īs 2016 VA sped towards the Earth, astronomers at the Virtual Telescope Project caught it on camera. While it didn’t enter our atmosphere, it did pass within a hair’s width of our planet, cosmically speaking: about 47,000 miles away, or within 20 percent of the distance to the moon, Maddie Stone reports for Gizmodo. That doesn’t mean that 2016 VA wasn’t exciting in it’s own way. While this one might have also made a bit of a boom had it come closer to Earth, it wouldn’t have sent humanity the way of the dinosaurs. At around 40 feet across, 2016 VA (as the astronomical community dubbed it) is similar in size to the meteorite that exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk back in 2013, David Dickinson writes for Universe Today. While it was far enough away to miss our atmosphere, astronomers spotted the space rock as it flew through Earth’s shadow.Īsteroids whizz by all the time, and it’s worth noting up front that in many ways this was no different. On Tuesday evening, a newly spotted asteroid flew within a stone’s throw of our planet.
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