It is thought to be a ‘dead comet’ which has been radically altered by orbiting our star for millions of years, now shapped like a skull. It measures 500m wide. It’s not thought to be on a collision course with our planet but in that case it would be likely to burn up in the atmosphere and become a shooting star. Scientists and astronomers are still excited to gather new data to learn about its composition and orbit.
Our encounter with the Halloween Death Asteroid in 2015 marked the closest approach of an object of that size since 2006. Researcher Pablo Santos-Sanz from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia has studied the asteroid to discover it’s characteristics. Some facts are known, some are not known yet. ‘We found that the object reflects about 6 percent of the light it receives from the sun,’ said Vishnu Reddy, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said.
