Enormous asteroid of around 2 km to zip past Earth on May 27

A giant 1.8-kilometre-wide asteroid almost twice the size of Burj Khalifa in Dubai is set to fly past Earth on May 27. The asteroid name 7335 (1989 JA) is the biggest one yet this year, to cross paths with our blue planet.

According to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), the enormous asteroid will be travelling at a staggering speed of around 47,200 mph or roughly 76,000 kmph as it flies by the Earth on Friday, May 27 (7:26 PM IST). 

An asteroid is considered to be "potentially hazardous" when it is at least 460 feet across and comes within 4.6 million miles of Earth's orbit around the sun. This may sound close on a cosmic scale, but this distance is more than 19 times farther away than the moon is from the Earth.

Notably, the asteroid will be at a close enough distance to be visible through a telescope. The next time the 1989 JA asteroid will come this close to Earth will be in the year 2194.

Asteroids are rocky fragments left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. An asteroid is classified as a near-Earth object when its distance from our planet is less than 1.3 times the distance from Earth to the Sun (the Earth-Sun distance is about 93 million miles).