According to CNN, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies recently stated that an asteroid, named 2024 YR4, has on average a 2% chance of hitting Earth in 2032.
Not much is known about 2024 YR4, but the asteroid is estimated to be 131 to 295 feet (40 to 90 meters) wide, a "size range comparable to that of a large building."
While those odds of an impact are slim, astronomers are closely tracking the space rock to uncover more details.
That's not even close to the size of the "planet-killer" asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of dinosaurs. That one was estimated to be about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter and marked the last known large asteroid to hit our world. Planet killer asteroids are space rocks that are 1 kilometer across or larger and could have a devastating effect on life.
In 2013, a 20-meter-diameter asteroid entered the Earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and exploded in mid-air, releasing 20 to 30 times the energy of the first atomic bombs, outshining the sun, radiating heat, damaging more than 7,000 buildings and injuring more than 1,000 people.
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