An asteroid struck Earth on Tuesday, Dec. 3, less than 12 hours after astronomers first discovered it.
The space rock, reckoned to be about 1.6-4 feet (0.5-1.2 meters), according to EarthSky, was seen as a bright fireball above Yakutia in Siberia, Russia, where it's thought that small fragments may have made it to the ground.
The event recalls what happened on Feb. 15, 2013, when a fireball was seen exploding about 19 miles (30 kilometers) above Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia's southern Ural region. That meteor's (shown above) shockwave shattered windows, injuring about 1,500 people. It was later calculated to measure about 66 feet (20 meters) in diameter.
Yesterday's fireball, first called C0WEPC5 then renamed 2024 XA1, harmlessly burned up in the atmosphere, with no damage reported.
It did so at 4:15 a.m. local time, as predicted by the European Space Agency's alert system. "Thanks to observations from astronomers around the world, our alert system was able to predict this impact to within +/- 10 seconds," said the European Space Agency on X.
2024 XA1 was found by astronomers at Kitt Peak National Observatory close to Tucson, Arizona. It marks the eleventh time a meteor on a collision course with Earth has been discovered before it enters the atmosphere, and the fourth time this year, said Richard Moissl of the ESA - Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre, on X.
The "Tunguska Event" -- also in Siberia -- in 1908 is one of the most famous asteroid incidents, though no eyewitness accounts exist. A shockwave from a 130-foot (40-meter) asteroid or comet fragment exploded about six miles (120 kilometers) above Siberia, destroying 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers) of forest.
The date of the annual Asteroid Day, which is held on June 30, commemorates the Tunguska Event.
Astronomers have since calculated that Earth was at that time passing through the Taurid swarm, the remnants of a comet, probably from Comet 2P/Encke, which scientists think may be responsible for catastrophic events on Earth every thousand years or so.
An asteroid or comet struck near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, forming the 110-mile (180-kilometer) wide Chicxulub crater. This event likely triggered an impact winter lasting decades, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs. In 2022, scientists announced that they had found a suspected second asteroid impact crater of a similar age below the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Guinea, West Africa, that measures five miles (nine kilometers) wide. It suggests that the Chicxulub impact may have had a smaller cosmic companion or have been part of a cluster.
Earlier this year, scientists published evidence supporting the Younger Dryas Impact, a comet that exploded in Earth's atmosphere 12,800 years ago, causing temperatures on Earth to dip. Platinum, meltglass and shock-fractured quartz -- all evidence of the forces and high temperatures associated with "airburst" comets -- were found at three separate sites in New Jersey, Maryland and South Carolina.