There were rumours doing the rounds for quite a while that the world would come to an end in the second half of the month with an asteroid colliding with the earth. But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has rubbished the speculation, saying that there is not an iota of truth to such claims.
"End of the world" rumours began spreading like wildfire on the Internet a couple of months ago, creating panic among the public. Conspiracy theorists have claimed that an asteroid, which has the potential to destroy life on earth, could hit somewhere near Puerto Rico between 15 and 28 September.
The hoax was so widespread that NASA was forced to clarify that nothing is going to happen this month.
"There is no scientific basis -- not one shred of evidence -- that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said in a statement obtained by CBS News.
"If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now," said Chodas, adding, "In fact, not a single one of the known objects has any credible chance of hitting our planet over the next century."
It may be recalled that asteroid 2004 BL86 passed the earth earlier this year at a distance of about 745,000 miles (1.2 million kilometres) or 3.1 times the distance from Earth to the Moon and it is not expected to come close to the earth in the next 200 years.
