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Dangerous asteroid zips by Earth just days after It was discovered

06 February 2017 23:02 (UTC +04:00)

Slooh Community Observatory on Thursday held a live webcast that gave viewers a rare chance to witness an asteroid roughly the size of a house fly past the Earth at less than half the distance to the moon, at 3.25 p.m. EST, APA reports quoting sputniknews.

The space rock, detected by the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System only three days before its remarkable flyby inside the lunar orbit, was Earth's third near-miss incident in just nine days, according to astronomers.

"It raises a few eyebrows when we see a number of close approaching NEAs over such a short period of time," said Slooh astronomer Paul Cox, cited by Space.com. "We'll investigate how this could be."