Gigantic asteroid four times bigger than UK comes close to earth, can be seen with naked eyes

Asteroid
A screen grab from YouTube video

A mammoth asteroid, possibly four times bigger the size of UK is now so close to earth that humans can see it with their naked eyes.

The space rock which is being named '4 Vesta' measures more than 325 miles in diameter and due to its vast size, it is visible even from 107 million miles away. The gigantic space rock is now sitting near the Mars, Saturn and Sagittarius constellations and it can be seen from both the hemispheres without the usage of a telescope.

From earth, this cosmic body will be seen as a yellow dot in the sky, pretty near to the red planet. Vesta 4 has a highly reflective body than the moon and this is another reason behind its visibility from the blue planet. The asteroid is expected to stay in earthly visionary boundary until July 16, 2018.

As per NASA, the asteroid has many craters on its surface, and experts believe that it might be the result of a large crash it sustained in the past.

4 Vesta was initially discovered in 1807. The asteroid is the largest in its belt, standing second to its sister Ceres. The asteroid holds the one of the tallest ever peaks discovered by modern science and one of the mountains in this rocky body is more than 13 miles high.

It should be noted that Ceres was recently classified as a dwarf planet and experts may even think about giving the same status to 4 Vesta in the coming days. Experts state that this giant asteroid has now come closer to the earth in the past 20 years.

Even though the asteroid is near to the earth, NASA has ruled out the possibility of an impact in the near future. However, conspiracy theorists argue that there are millions of threatening space bodies in the space which may cause devastation on earth and they believe that NASA is intentionally covering up these facts fearing public panic.

This article was first published on June 28, 2018
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