Asteroid Larger Than Empire State Building To Pass Earth on Monday

A massive asteroid larger than the Empire State Building is due to fly past the Earth on Monday.

The asteroid, named 488453 (1994 XD), is estimated to be around somewhere between 370 and 830 meters across, or between 1,213 and 2,723 feet, according to NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) data.

The Empire State Building is around 1,250 feet tall at its roof, and 1,400 feet at its tallest point.

The asteroid is expected to pass the Earth at a distance of 0.02114 AU, with one AU being the distance between the Earth and the sun. 0.02114 AU equates to around 1,965,000 miles.

For context, the moon orbits the Earth at a distance of around 239,000 miles, and Venus is 38 million miles away at its closest point.

"Asteroids are 'bits of a planet that didn't happen' that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Asteroid Belt," Jay Tate, the director of the Spaceguard Center observatory in the U.K., previously told Newsweek. "However, as they are relatively small, asteroids can be disturbed quite easily, so they can develop orbits that cross those of planets."

NASA estimates there are more than 1,100,000 asteroids in our solar system, and is constantly discovering more.

Asteroid 488453 (1994 XD) is forecast to soar past us at a speed of 21.47 km/s, or around 48,000 mph. A speeding bullet only travels at roughly 1,800 mph, about 27 times slower. NASA's JPL Small-Body database shows that 488453 (1994 XD) orbits the sun once every 3.6 years or so, but doesn't pass close by the Earth every time.

Most asteroids in the solar system are found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Occasionally, Jupiter's gravitational influence causes these asteroids to be ejected into the inner solar system, soaring past planets like ours.

"We believe they formed in the asteroid belt and got ejected by impact, or their orbits were destabilized due to the presence of Jupiter resonances in the belt," Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, told Newsweek in October.

Asteroids that reach a distance of 30 million miles from the Earth are classified as "near-Earth objects" (NEOs), of which NASA has found 31,000.

NEOs that get within 4.6 million miles of Earth's orbit and are larger than 460 feet across, are defined as potentially hazardous objects.

Because of its size and proximity to our planet, 488453 (1994 XD) is classified as one of these potentially hazardous objects, alongside around 2,300 others.

"The potentially hazardous designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid's orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, told Newsweek in 2022.

Luckily, none of these asteroids are thought to pose any significant risk of colliding with the Earth, with NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office stating that "no known asteroid poses a significant risk of impact with Earth over the next 100 years."

However, if an asteroid of the scale of 488453 (1994 XD) did collide with the Earth, the results would be catastrophic.

"An asteroid 100-200m [330-650 feet] in diameter would cause a regional disaster, taking out a small country, but with the resulting global consequences in terms of the global economy and 'globalization,'" Tate told Newsweek in August 2022.

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