700 meter skull shaped asteroid is about to fly past Earth

The return of the skull-shaped meteorite in 2018 will give astronomers the opportunity to study and characterize it.

A photo of a skull-shaped meteorite taken by the Arecibo Observatory. Photo: NASA.

The skull-shaped asteroid that flew past Earth on Halloween night in 2015 will fly past our planet again around November 2018, according to the International Business Times.

In mid-October 2015, a group of astronomers using the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii discovered a strange meteorite that looked very similar to a human skull when observed under the right lighting conditions. In addition to its shape, the meteorite also had features that resembled human eye sockets and noses.

A few weeks later, on Halloween night (October 31, 2015), a 686- to 700-meter-sized meteorite came closest to Earth, flying past at a distance of 486,000 km, 1.3 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.

The asteroid, now officially known as 2015 TB145, is coming back. According to a report on Phys.org, it is currently 3.7 astronomical units away from Earth and will fly by in November 2018. However, this time it will be much farther away, estimated to be 105 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.

During the asteroid’s previous flyby, astronomers from NASA and elsewhere around the world used different telescopes to photograph and study its characteristics. According to astrophysicist Pablo Santos-Sanz of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC), the observations revealed that the asteroid was a slightly flattened, dark, elliptical shape, only slightly brighter than graphite.

The 2018 return of 2015 TB145 will give Santos-Sanz and other astronomers another chance to study and characterize it. “Although this flyby was not a smooth one, we were able to collect new data that will improve our understanding of this object and similar objects that come close to our planet,” Santos-Sanz said.

According to VNE