A giant space rock passed by our planet overnight. The asteroid, number 2004 BL 86, was between 300 to 500 metres in size which is about the size of McMahon Stadium with the parking lots thrown in.
When it flew by it was 1.2 million kilometres away which is actually really close in space terms but scientists say it never posed a threat.
Devon Hamilton with Telus Spark says it's not unusual to have asteroids passing by, "every few years we have an asteroid come whizzing by the Earth, what's nice about this one is that we knew it was coming. In the past, quite often, we didn't know in advance, but now because of programs that are essentially taking a census of all the asteroids that could come near the Earth; we've been watching this one for a while."
Asteroid number 2004 BL 86 was discovered in 2004 and astronomers have been following it ever since.
Hamilton says we can learn a lot from space rocks, "asteroids provide us a window into early solar systems and into the history of our solar system. The solar system has been around for 4.5 billion years but we haven't been, so if we want to understand what the early solar system was like, we need to essentially see samples from that. An asteroid gives us a window, even if we're just looking at its surface; we're getting a window into the past history of what was going on in our solar system."
Both the asteroid and Earth were created at the same time - 4.5 billion years ago.
