Creepy Skull-Shaped Asteroid Called The ‘Death Comet’ Will Fly By The Earth Soon

Via Pixabay

The mere thought of asteroids are pretty frightening. The possibility of an extinction level event wiping out all life on the Earth is rather petrifying. But imagine a civilization-destroying asteroid heading straight for the planet that looked like a creepy skull? Absolutely terrifying.

NASA has designated Asteroid 2015 TB145 as a “potentially hazardous object” (PHO), but don’t be scared because that only means that it is a “near-Earth asteroid or comet with an orbit such that it has the potential to make close approaches to the Earth and is of a size large enough to cause significant regional damage in the event of impact.”

Asteroid 2015 TB145 will fly by Earth and get as close as 25 million miles, which is far, but not that far in space terms. What you should be frightened by is that this “death comet” looks like a human skull.

Also scary is that this space object was discovered on October 10, 2015, by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) on top of the Haleakala Volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The eerie asteroid zoomed past Earth on October 31, 2015, which is Halloween. In 2015, the dead comet soared as close as 300,000 miles to the Earth, nearly the same average distance from our planet to the Moon. NASA nicknamed the asteroid “Great Pumpkin” as a reference to the Charlie Brown Halloween special. Needs to have a scarier name such as “Skull Comet.”

The asteroid has a diameter of about 2,000 feet, so it is too small and will be too far to be seen with the naked eye. “Even though that is relatively close by celestial standards, it is expected to be fairly faint, so night-sky Earth observers would need at least a small telescope to view it,” Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, said in a statement in 2015.

The asteroid is an extinct comet or death comet, meaning that the asteroid orbits too close to the sun and all of its ice has been melted. Asteroid 2015 TB145 has no ice and so that means that it does not have ice to melt into gas to give it a tail.

You won’t be seeing Asteroid 2015 TB145 for a real long time because it doesn’t come near the Earth until 2088, when it will be 5.4 million miles near Earth.

[FoxNews]