Car-sized asteroid comes extremely close to Earth today

An asteroid the size of a car recently made a close pass by Earth. The space rock, called Asteroid 2024 GJ2, was only discovered on April 9, few days before its near-Earth encounter on April 12.

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According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the asteroid is around 3 metres in size and was discovered on Tuesday by the Pan-STARRS 2 telescope in Hawaii, USA.

Astronomers have calculated that the space rock will graze by Earth at a 19.3-thousand-km distance - that's just three percent the distance between the Earth and the moon.

According to the ESA, the asteroid measures between 2.5m and 5m.

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