Original article (in Slovenian) was published on 03/01/2022
Nereus 4660 passed Earth at a distance of 3.9 million kilometers, about ten times the distance between Earth and the Moon, explained the astrophysicist Dunja Fabjan.
On 10 December, the Slovenian news site Slovenske novice published an article titled Look up in the sky, there’s a giant asteroid heading towards us. The article reported that although experts expect asteroid Nereus 4660 will miss Earth, this is the closest it has been to us in the last twenty years.
According to the US space agency NASA’s online database, the astronomical object Nereus 4660 indeed flew past Earth on 11 December, the day after the article was published on the news site.
However, Dunja Fabjan, an astrophysicist at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in Ljubljana, told Razkrinkavanje.si that the title of the article is misleading, as it implies the asteroid was visible to the naked eye. The author of the article made it clear that “a telescope is actually needed” to see the asteroid only in the second paragraph of the text. The closest the asteroid came to Earth that day was around 2 p.m., when it was still daylight in central Europe, Fabjan explained. “We don’t use normal telescopes during the day; the sky is too bright for such faint objects.”
The second half of the title, that “there’s a giant asteroid heading towards us”, is also inaccurate, she said, as Nereus 4660 flew past Earth at a distance of ten times the distance between Earth and the Moon. The fact that the asteroid would miss Earth and appeared to pose no immediate threat is only clarified later in the text, Fabjan noted.
The article subtitle refers to “NASA experts”, but only names Franck Marchis, a senior research scientist working at the SETI Institute in California, a research organisation devoted to the study of the universe, not at NASA.
The SETI Institute confirmed to Razkrinkavanje.si that Marchis is employed by them and that he gave a statement about the asteroid to the British tabloid newspaper The Sun. Among other things, he said “asteroid Nereus is not a threat at the moment, but its orbit could be deflected by various things, such as an encounter with another asteroid or a planet like Venus”. He added that any deviation from Nereus’s calculated orbit could be an issue.
A comparison between the article published by Slovenske novice on 10 December and the article published the day before by The Sun shows similarities between the two. The adjective ‘giant’ is used in the headline of both the British and the Slovenian articles, and both articles quoted the same statement by Franck Marchis.
Slovenske novice also reported that the giant asteroid Nereus 4660 could cause destruction the size of central Great Britain if it hit Earth’s surface. This is true, according to Dunja Fabjan, but she stressed that such scientific assessments depend on various factors, such as the size and composition of the astronomical object, the velocity of the asteroid and the angle at which it would hit Earth.
Slovenske novice’s claim is unfounded, as it is not supported by sufficient facts and the arguments put forward by the author are not credible.
In addition, the claim has no real basis in the text to which it refers. Its purpose is to attract the attention of readers with a sensationalist headline promising content that is not actually in article.