A CHILLING simulation video has revealed what it would look like if ‘city-killer’ Asteroid 2024 YR4 hit Earth.
The space rock is currently being monitored by experts over a 1-in-43 chance it could collide with Earth in 2032.
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Despite it still having just a 2.3 per cent chance of hitting Earth, 2024 YR4 has prompted space agencies to draw up preventative measures.
Astronomers believe it is between 40 and 90 metres wide (130–295 feet), and would blow a city-sized crater into the Earth’s crust.
If the hunk of cosmic debris veers onto a collision course with our planet, it could rip through the atmosphere at 38,000mph.
That much force would release a huge amount of energy – about as much as 100 nuclear bombs.
The video, created by 3D specialist Alvaro Gracia Montoya at MetaBallStudios, shows the impact levelling an entire city.
Fortunately, there is still a 97.7 per cent chance that Asteroid 2024 YR4 will safely pass our planet.
Experts at Nasa and the European Space Agency will use the James Webb Space Telescope to keep a close eye on the near-Earth asteroid in the coming weeks.
After March, the space rock will disappear from view and won’t return again until 2028.
Our galaxy – and the universe as a whole – is a chaotic place, where collisions and explosions are happening all the time.
Yet, Earth has enjoyed a relatively peaceful recent cosmic history.
The last asteroid to collide with our planet was 115 years ago, when a space rock roughly 40 metres (130 feet) in diameter exploded in the sky over Siberia.
Known as the Tunguska Impact event, local eyewitnesses at the time reported seeing a large fireball in the sky and hearing a loud explosion.
Widespread forest fires were reported, as well as trees blown over for miles from the powerful explosion.
Scientists explored the remote location in 1927, and found “ample evidence of the asteroid’s destruction caused by the shock wave and heat blast from the aerial explosion,” according to Nasa.
Archaeologists have found evidence of similar events in the past.
Some 66million years ago, a giant asteroid believed to be about 10 and 15 kilometres wide crashed into the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
The devastation was planet-wide, and drove the dinosaurs into extinction.
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