You can come out of the bomb shelters, now: recently-published media reports suggesting that a massive asteroid could collide with the Earth sometime next month are absolutely untrue, NASA officials confirmed earlier this week in a statement.
According to Gizmodo and Space.com, the rumors have been around for years but have recently been spreading like wildfire over the Internet. The reports claimed that a massive asteroid would hit the planet’s surface near Puerto Rico during the second half of September, leading to widespread havoc and destruction throughout North, Central, and South America.
While the claims have gone viral, Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said that there is “no scientific basis – not one shred of evidence – that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates.”
In fact, according to the US space agency’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program, there are no observations of any asteroids or comets capable of impacting Earth anytime in the foreseeable future, and less than a 0.01 percent chance of such an impact happening in the next 100 years.
Another in a long line of false doom-and-gloom reports
JPL’s Near-Earth Object office is an international group of astronomers and scientists who keep an eye on the sky using various telescopes, searching for objects which could potentially damage the planet. If any object was on a trajectory to crash down in the Caribbean, NASA said, Chodas and his colleagues would have already spotted it.
This is hardly the first rumor of asteroids on a collision course with our home planet, they noted. In 2011, the source of the hysteria centered on the so-called “doomsday” comet, which never posed a threat to Earth– it broke up into a small debris stream in space.
In 2012, as part of supposed Mayan calendar prophecy claiming that the world would end with a massive asteroid impact, and earlier this year, rumors that asteroids 2004 BL86 and 2014 YB35 were on dangerous near-Earth trajectories proved untrue, and their respective January and March fly-bys occurred without incident, as Near-Earth Office scientists had predicted.
“Again, there is no existing evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object is on a trajectory that will impact Earth. In fact, not a single one of the known objects has any credible chance of hitting our planet over the next century,” Chodas emphasized. So it’s officially safe to take off the tin-foil hat and come out of your underground bunkers, folks.
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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