Apocalypse avoided: Earth just escaped an asteroid hit! And you weren't even aware of it

A small asteroid dubbed 2017 AG13, was detected by space scientists on January 7 2017, it passed by Earth on January 9 2017 at 1247 GMT (0747 EST).

The space rock passed pretty close to the Earth, at half the distance of the moon from Earth, which is around 192,500 kilometers (119,500 miles).

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This near-Earth object (NEO) was first discovered by the University of Arizona-based Catalina Sky Survey on Saturday, January 7. It was found that the asteroid took around 347 Earth days to complete one revolution around the Sun.

It was traveling at a speed of 16 kilometers (approx 9.9 miles) per second when it passed on January 9, 2017, Eric Feldman, an expert stated, on his astronomy news website Slooh: "This is moving very quickly, very nearby to us."

He even revealed that this was almost equal to the size of the asteroid that burned up over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013.

More than a thousand people are said to have been injured in the impact of that explosion, Feldman was quoted by  news.com.au as saying.

This NEO is likely to pass by Venus's orbit too.

This space rock is believed to be as wide as 34 meters (111 feet), according to astronomers at the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In comparison to the Earth's nearly-circular orbit, the orbit of this asteroid is far more elliptical. It was also found that the asteroid would get as close as 0.55 astronomical units (AU) to the Sun and as far as 1.36 AU, Space.com said.

The average distance from the Earth to Sun is 1 AU, which is equal to 150 million kilometers (93 million miles).

Numerous space rocks and NEOs pass through Earth's neighborhood, out of which 15,000 have been spotted. NASA researchers have analysed numerous celestial objects that are likely to pose a danger to Earth and revealed that none of these  are going to cause any damage to our planet in the near future.