- An asteroid that looks a like a human skull, commonly known as the Halloween Asteroid — or 2015 TB145 — could pass close to Earth in early November 2018.
- It's most recent visit was on October 31, 2015.
- This year, it will be much further away — about 105 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
You're probably not going to see it, but in 2018, a small Solar System object is going to pay us a second visit since its discovery in 2015. It's called 2015 TB145, also known as the Halloween Asteroid — and for good reason.
It's just perfect. It looks a little like a human skull in certain conditions; it's as dark as coal; its closest approach to Earth on its previous visit was on 31 October, 2015; and it's probably a dead comet.
You can’t get a better concatenation of thematically related circumstances.
There are going to be a few differences with next year's visit though. The Halloween asteroid's first known flyby was really close — it buzzed by Earth just outside the Moon's orbit, at 486,000 kilometres (302,000 miles).
But it has a large orbital inclination, or highly tilted orbit, so when it swings by Earth, its distance from us varies. The 2015 flyby was the closest the asteroid will be to us for another 500 years.
It doesn't always visit on Halloween, either. Its orbital period is 1,112 days, or just over three years. So every time it visits, it's just a little later in our year than the last time.
The 2018 flyby is going to take place in early November, and the asteroid is going to be much farther away — around 105 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
Meanwhile the object’s orbital eccentricity and tilt suggest that the asteroid was once a comet that has since lost all its volatile compounds after numerous orbits around the Sun, and is now dead rock flying through space.
When the Halloween Asteroid returns this year, even though it will be much farther away, researchers are going to be taking the opportunity to learn even more about it — and, hopefully, by extension, other objects of similar mass that approach our planet.
The Halloween asteroid is still around 3.7 times the distance between the Sun and Earth away, so you have plenty of time to bone up.
If you want to know more, Santos-Sanz, Müller and their team published a paper about the asteroid earlier this year in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
It'd better still look like a skull when it comes around.
SEE ALSO: NASA researcher preparing future missions on Mars: 'Elon Musk pushes everyone else forward'