‘Hazardous asteroid’ 6 times wider than Qutub Minar’s height to fly past Earth on Feb 2

A potential ‘hazardous’ asteroid six times wider than the height of Delhi’s Qutub Minar, the tallest minaret in the world, is expected to pass our home planet on Friday (Feb 2). The asteroid, named 2008 OS7 is believed to be between 690 and 1,570 feet in width, and as wide as the Empire State building in New York.

The asteroid will pass Earth at a distance of around 1.77 million miles. To put things into perspective, our planetary neighbour Venus fares around 38 million miles away from Earth at the closest point. Also, the Moon revolves around 240,000 miles away from Earth.

While moving by the Earth, the asteroid will cruise at the speed of 18.2km per second and will make its closest flyby in the afternoon of February 2.

What are Near Earth Objects (NEO) and potentially hazardous asteroids (PHA)?

Asteroids, remnants of the solar system's formation, are majorly found in the Asteroid Belt situated between Mars and Jupiter. While many are small, some, like Ceres, boast significant size, stretching approximately 600 miles across. Periodically, either through Jupiter's gravitational pull or collisions, these celestial bodies stray into the inner solar system, hurtling past Earth.

Watch:Earth braces for a close encounter with five colossal asteroids this week

One such asteroid, 2008 OS7, falls under the classification of both a "Near Earth Object" (NEO) and a "potentially hazardous asteroid" (PHA) due to its size and proximity to Earth. NEOs are those within 30 million miles of Earth, encompassing around 31,000 objects within the solar system. PHAs, however, lie even closer, within 4.6 million miles, and exceed 460 feet in diameter. NASA currently monitors approximately 2,350 PHAs.

"A potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is one that has an orbit intersecting the Earth's orbit around the Sun by less than 0.05 astronomical units (1 AU is the distance to the Sun), that's just over 4.5 million miles. It also has to have an absolute brightness of 22.0 or less (lower values of the magnitude are brighter = larger objects), ie. an asteroid (or comet) that would cause significant regional damage if it hit the Earth," Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the UK, was quoted as saying by Newsweek.

"Not all NEOs are potentially hazardous, but all hazardous objects are NEOs," he added.

(With inputs from agencies)