Gerrard Kaonga
A new fear has been unlocked for many after watching a video showing the scale of a humungous near-Earth asteroid if it landed slap bang on New York City.
Eros is the second largest near-Earth asteroid known to astronomers.
This means it has been identified as being nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets, bringing it into Earth’s neighborhood.
The asteroid is considered to be about twice the size of New York City’s Manhattan Island, a scale realized in a frightening simulation video.
The brief footage shows what it would look like if the oddly shaped asteroid descended upon New York City, only to stop inches away from touching the planet.
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Shared on Reddit on November 10, the video has so far been upvoted more than 10,000 times and commenters remarked at how devastating it would be an asteroid to strike the planet.
“Imagine the crust of the Earth instantly turning to liquid, and the entire world being engulfed in lava,” one user commented.
“Now imagine those molten globs of lava each being flung into the vast reaches of space, exploring their own corner of our galaxy as they slowly cool.”
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“Idk if this one is big enough for global liquefaction of the surface but I heavily doubt it. The atmosphere would turn into an oven though,” another replied.
“Pretty sure this is bigger than what killed the dinosaurs, and the planet took eons to recover,” another added.
The Eros asteroid is in fact bigger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, which is believed to have been around 10-15 km wide.
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The Eros asteroid is more than double that, measuring 33 km wide, 13 km across and 13 km deep - pretty big, then.
Before we give in to panic though, when we say near-Earth, the closest it actually tends to get is 22 million km away from our planet.
That means we don't have to worry too much about it plonking itself down on NYC in the near-future, but scientists revealed in 1998 that there is a roughly five percent chance it will hit Earth eventually.
However, the end isn't nigh quite yet. Scientists from the University of Pisa modelled Eros' potential orbits in 1996, and found a hypothetical collision scheduled for 1.14 million years in the future.
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With NASA already working on a defence system to shield us from killer asteroids, hopefully we'll have worked out what to do about Eros by then if it does head our way.