A large space rock that zipped past Earth on Halloween on Saturday, 31 October was most likely a dead comet that fittingly bears an eerie resemblance to a skull.
According to an official statement released by NASA, Scientists observing the asteroid "2015 TB145" determined that the celestial object was more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the Sun.
Optical and radar observatories around the world have also observed the belated comet, thus; providing even more data, including the first close-up views of its surface.
Asteroid 2015 TB145 safely flew by Earth at just under 1.3 lunar distances, or about 486,000 km, on Halloween.
The first radar images of the dead comet were generated by the National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
"The data may indicate that the object might be a dead comet, but in the Arecibo images it appears to have donned a skull costume for its Halloween flyby," Kelly Fast, programme scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, said.
"We found that the object reflects about six percent of the light it receives from the sun," Vishnu Reddy, research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, Arizona, said.
"That is similar to fresh asphalt, and while here on Earth we think that is pretty dark, it is brighter than a typical comet which reflects only 3 to 5 percent of the light. That suggests it could be cometary in origin -- but as there is no coma evident, the conclusion is it is a dead comet," he added.
The University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS-1 (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System), Hawaii discovered asteroid 2015 TB145 on 10 October this year.
The next time the asteroid will be in Earth's neighbourhood will be in September 2018, when it will make a distant pass at about 38 million km or about a quarter the distance between Earth and the sun.
