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This is a list of asteroids that have impacted Earth after discovery and orbit calculation that predicted the impact in advance. As of December 2024 [update] , all of the asteroids with predicted impacts were under 5 m (16 ft) in size that were discovered just hours before impact, and burned up in the atmosphere as meteors .
For asteroids that are on track to hit Earth, the predicted probability of impact never stops increasing as more observations are made. This initially very similar pattern makes it difficult to quickly differentiate between asteroids which will be millions of kilometres from Earth and those which will hit it.
The asteroid's provisional designation as a minor planet, "2024 YR 4", was assigned by the Minor Planet Center when its discovery was announced on 27 December 2024. [2] 2024 indicates the discovery year, the first letter, "Y", indicates that the asteroid was discovered in the second half-month of December (16 to 31 December) of that year, and "R 4" indicates that it was the 117th provisional ...
In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported: "It's 100 percent certain we'll be hit [by a devastating asteroid], but we're not 100 percent certain when." [ 10 ] Also in 2018, physicist Stephen Hawking considered in his final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions that an asteroid collision was the biggest threat to the planet.
Asteroids are given minor planet numbers, but not all minor planets are asteroids. Minor planet numbers are also given to objects of the Kuiper belt , which is similar to the asteroid belt but farther out (around 30–60 AU), whereas asteroids are mostly between 2–3 AU from the Sun or at the orbit of Jupiter 5 AU from the Sun.
Most small asteroids are believed to be piles of rubble held together loosely by gravity, although the largest are probably solid. Some asteroids have moons or are co-orbiting binaries: rubble piles, moons, binaries, and scattered asteroid families are thought to be the results of collisions that disrupted a parent asteroid, or possibly a ...
2024 XA 1, formerly designated as C0WEPC5, is a small meteoroid that fell over eastern Siberia near the city of Olekminsk on 3 December 2024, 16:15 GMT, around 1,000 kilometers east of the Tunguska event impact location.
The list below shows all approaches by potentially hazardous objects (objects which can approach Earth within 0.05 astronomical units (AU)) without atmospheric contact which have been the closest ever observed at some point in time, from the discovery of the first such object to the record holder as of February 2025.