Asteroid Florence on Friday joined five others on the list of top celebrity asteroid near misses, meaning they made news on Earth in the past year or so. Dozens of others, not to be mixed up with meteors and comets, are just fading stars.
UPI reported that Florence, the largest near-Earth asteroid discovered, was tracked by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory flying past the Earth at a closest range of 4,390,892 miles.
To give some perspective, that is about 18 times the distance between Earth and the moon and, while Florence is said to be the biggest asteroid to pass by Earth in such close proximity, it certainly wasn’t the first.
Here are the other star asteroids by their celestial stage names.
2017 AG13: An asteroid measuring the height of a 10-story building slipped past Earth quietly on January 9 of this year.
News.com.au referred to the asteroid as 2017 AG13, and said it came twice as close to Earth as the moon.
The asteroid has a fan club:
W2016 QA2: A new asteroid was discovered hours before nearly hitting Earth in August of last year. Measuring approximately 50-100 feet, Popular Mechanics noted that the asteroid, named 2016 QA2, missed Earth “by less than a quarter of the distance to the moon.”
2017 OO1: On July 23 of this year, an asteroid the size of a passenger aircraft was detected by telescopes in Hawaii.
The Huffington Post noted that this came three days after the asteroid, 2017 OO1, passed Earth by just 76,448 miles, or a third of the distance between Earth and the moon.
2014 JO25: An asteroid measuring about 2,000 feet in length came hurtling past Earth on April 19 of this year.
The New York Times reported that the asteroid, named 2014 JO25, passed our planet by 1.1 million miles, or about 4.6 times the distance between Earth and the moon.
2017 BH30: Also in January of this year, a small asteroid managed to pass within 32,200 miles of Earth, which is about 7.6 times closer to Earth than the moon.
The Daily Caller noted that the asteroid, 2017 BH30, measured about 19 feet wide.
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