Skull comet to pass Earth after Halloween
A "dead" comet that resembles a human skull is set to travel past the Earth less than a fortnight after Halloween. The space rock, officially named Asteroid 2015 TB145, was discovered on 10 October 2015 by a team at the University of Hawaii.
NASA fittingly nicknamed the asteroid the "Great Pumpkin" before it passed the Earth at a distance of roughly 302,000 miles (486,021km) on Halloween that year. It is expected to fly past again on 11 November 2018 at a distance of more than 25 million miles, reports Sky News.
Scientists who observed the asteroid using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, believe it to be an extinct comet which has lost its ice due to repeated orbits of the sun.
