An Asteroid Nearly Hit Earth 2 Days Ago!

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Two days ago, an asteroid the size of a blue whale just barely missed the Earth.

[00:00:04]And do you want to know the worst part?

[00:00:06]We only [music] spotted it about a week ago. This is the asteroid. It's about 30 m wide and it's traveling at over 32,000 km/h. It passed just 91,000 km from the Earth. That's well within the moon's orbit. This asteroid [music] is about the same size as the one that exploded over Russia back in 2013. That shattered windows across six cities and injured nearly 2,000 people. If it actually did hit us, it would exploded up in the air releasing as much energy as 40 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. So, the real question is, how did we only spot it a week before the flyby? It's really because objects this small are incredibly faint. [music] We've only found about 1% of the near-Earth asteroids in this size range.

[00:00:48]The rest are out there in the dark and only become bright enough to spot when they're already on our doorstep. But, we are currently building tools to help fix that. To learn more, make sure you subscribe.