A ‘death comet’ will be zipping passed earth just after Halloween this year. The asteroid with a skull-like face will make its second trip near earth in three years after flying a worrisome 302,000 miles from our planet on October 31, 2015. This year, the comet will be a much more comfortable 24million miles away on November 11, Mother Nature Network reported. The comet, officially recognized as 2015 TB145, has a few nicknames including ‘Halloween asteroid’, ‘death comet’ and ‘The Great Pumpkin’ by NASA.
The 2000-foot-wide rock gets the name ‘death comet’ not only because of its human skull face, but because it’s believed to have been long dead. Numerous passes around the sun likely stripped the comet of its volatiles, according to Mother Nature Network. ‘We found that the object reflects about 6 percent of the light it receives from the sun,’ said Vishnu Reddy, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona said in 2015. READ MORE
