asteroid

Not sure if this is good news or bad news, but an asteroid breezed past Earth this week, two days after it was discovered. That giant space rock so many of you voted for almost happened.

According to TIME, “The space rock, which is officially called 2017 AG13, flew between Earth and the moon Monday about 8 a.m. EST.”The object came “within half the distance of the moon.” Talk about a case of the Mondays! Am I right???

Now, speaking seriously, considering all that we have going on in the world, is this good news or bad news? You decide.

via Imgur

The opportunity to see a big space rock slam into our planet will likely prove too alluring for some brave and reckless souls to resist.

Whenever a massive asteroid lines a city up in its crosshairs — and it's just a matter of time before this happens if humanity doesn't take some defensive measures, experts stress — a few rubberneckers are bound to ignore evacuation orders and head toward the impact site to get an eyeful of a once-in-a-lifetime event.

While moonwalker Buzz Aldrin thinks that a mission sending humans to an asteroid is a good idea, the Apollo astronaut isn't so happy with NASA's current plan to use a robot to shrink-wrap a space rock and park it near the moon.

The space agency's asteroid plan centers on launching a robotic mission that aims to capture an asteroid — or a smaller boulder from a space rock — and deliver it to an orbit around the moon where astronauts can visit and sample it sometime in the 2020s. Aldrin would rather see NASA launch astronauts on a mission to an asteroid still in deep space.

Observations at many sites in South America, including the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) La Silla Observatory, have made the surprise discovery that two dense and narrow rings surround the remote asteroid Chariklo. This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the fifth body in the solar system — after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — to have this feature. The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disk of debris.

This beautiful and eerie photograph is evidence of what astronomers believe could be remnants of a head-on collision of 2 asteroids, resulting in an X-shaped debris pattern ahead of a long stream of dust that's usually indicative of a comet.