Two meteorites fly close to the earth today

Two meteorites move near the earth today and they can be seen through a conventional telescope.

Telescopes in the US state of Arizona discovered 2012 QG42 and 2012 QC8 , the names of two meteors on August 26. They are moving towards the earth and the moon and will reach the closest position to the Earth on September 14, National Geographic reported.

2012 QC8 is about 1,000m wide. The shortest distance between it and the earth is 8.7 million km, which is 23 times the distance between the moon and the globe. With a width from 190 to 430m, 2012 QG42 is a smaller meteorite, but comes closer to the planet. At 13:10 (Hanoi), this sky stone will fly about 2.8 million km away, equivalent to 7.5 times the distance between the moon and the earth.

Illustration of two meteors in the solar system.

All calculations show that 2012 QG42 is not dangerous to the earth, but this is the time that it has come closest to the globe in the past few hundred years.

"So 2012 QG42 can become a threat to the future green planet , " said Don Yeomans, Program Manager of the Near-Earth Objects of the US Aerospace Agency.

Yeomans said that human devices only detected 1,700 objects of size equal to or greater than 2012 QG42. After 40,000 years, an object in that group will hit the earth with the power of at least 140 million tons of TNT.

"The consequences of the explosion are the birth of a hole with a minimum diameter of 3 km," Yeomans commented.

Hours before 2012 QG42 flew to the closest position to the earth and reached the highest brightness, people could observe it with telescopes with a diameter of 30cm or more.