Asteroid visit and rare Christmas full moon will highlight the night skies.
Not only are we going to be treated with a rare Christmas full moon this year, but on the same night a pretty good-sized asteroid will zoom across the sky, according to an article on al.com.
The large asteroid, known as 163899 or 2003 SD220, will make a fly-by of the Earth at a distance of around 6.8 million miles away, or about 28 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
The space rock, approximately 1.5 miles wide, has no chance of striking the Earth, despite some Internet claims predicting earthquakes and tidal waves. In fact, the asteroid will be impossible to see with the naked eye, but amateur astronomers with telescopes will be likely to spot the object as it makes its path across the skies.
The asteroid is on NASA’s list of potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), ones that the agency has identified as problematic if they were to get close to Earth, but the asteroid’s orbit is well-known to observers and NASA has verified the visitor will not come within what is described as a dangerous distance to the planet.
Still, astronomers are excited about viewing the object as it passes by on this trip, because they are predicting when it returns in 2018 it will come a good deal closer to Earth, and this will be a good opportunity to study the path and size of the celestial body.
Eddie Irizarry of EarthSky wrote that even if this asteroid, which was first discovered in 2003, were to pass closer to the Earth, there is no scientific evidence that a fly-by of an asteroid can cause seismic activity on our own planet, unless of course it collided with the Earth, but that will not be the case this Christmas.
The pass-by comes in conjunction with the first Christmas full moon since 1977, making it even more delightful for sky watchers over the holidays, and follows a recent asteroid fly-by, asteroid 2015 TB145, that occurred on Halloween night this year. That space rock, about 1,300 feet in diameter, came within about 300,000 miles of the Earth, moving at a speed approaching 78,000 miles per hour.