Palermo Scale News Today

Named 2023 FM, the space rock is due to whizz by at about 35,000 mph (56,000 km/h), coming within 1.8 million miles of our planet at 14:09 BST (09:09 EDT) today.

It seems today if you want to make your name famous you have two choices – star in “leaked” home pornography tapes, or discover something that has so far eluded the capacity to be measured, find a way to measure it, develop a way to rank the measurements or place them into categories, and attach your name to the resulting scale. For example, the “Frater Scale” could be a ranking of items on a list - a better name for a "top 10 list" - where item 1 ranks as first on the Frater...

This week, space experts warned of an Olympic swimming pool-sized space rock which might hit Earth on Valentines Day 2046, with swathes of the US at risk - but how many more are out there?

Less than two weeks after it was discovered, asteroid 2023 DW sits at the top of the "risk list" maintained by the European Space Agency.

Earlier this year, the discovery of a potentially hazardous asteroid took astronomers on a roller coaster ride.

Asteroids are just space rocks measuring some kilometres across. But a direct hit and they cause mayhem for any living thing that's present on a planet. They have potential to wipe out life off the face of the planet or at least dramatically alter the dominance of species.

The asteroid was moving so fast that there was not enough time to attempt deflection and the European Space Agency (ESA) said that worryingly, the chance of impact appeared to increase.