The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, has set off alerts around the world, after announcing that a huge asteroid, the size of ten stacked buses, is rushing rapidly towards Earth.
Earth The space rock, which has been named 2013 WV44, will pass by the planet next Wednesday.
According to NASA researchers, the space rock is up to 524 feet (160 meters) in diameter, making it larger than the London Eye (394 feet) and Big Ben (310 feet).
However, the agency assured that it does not represent a direct threat to Earth, since it will not approach more than 0.02334 astronomical units, that is, 2.1 million miles, so it will not affect life on the planet.
It is worth mentioning that despite the fact that the asteroid will be about nine times further away than the moon, it is classified as a near-Earth object (NEO) and is being tracked by NASA.
"NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been pulled by the gravitational pull of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter Earth's neighborhood," NASA detailed when talking about 2013 WV44.
Similarly, the agency explained that NEOs are mainly made up of ice with embedded dust particles. NASA added that comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system, while most rocky asteroids formed in the warm inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
According to the agency, objects that are 1.3 astronomical units (AU) (120.8 million miles) from the sun and, therefore, 0.3 AU (27.8 million miles) away from Earth's orbit are classified as NEOs. So while 2013 WV44 will be 2.1 million miles away, this is relatively close in astronomical terms.
