Like a star by Zuzana Valkova

Many Hollywood movies have something in common with space. Aliens, space ships or dangerous space objects. In Armageddon it was a huge asteroid, which they were able to destroy before it could destroy anything on Earth. In Deep Impact the asteroid landed on Earth and caused big flood and killed many people. As you can see it's usually an asteroid. Today one of these is coming close to the Earth. This one isn't dangerous; it won't be close enough to hit the planet. Thank God. But it will be close enough to be watchable with medium size telescope. Next time you can see asteroid big like this one, is in 2027, so don't hesitate. For you to know what are you going to see: asteroid is a kind of astronomical object, which can be composed from carbonaceous, silicaceous or metallic. The name asteroid comes from Greek word and it means star-like. You can also hear the names minor planet or planetoids. In our solar system there are millions of them that orbit around the Sun. They can orbit alone or in the groups or like a family of asteroids. Groups are looser as families, which can be result of one damaged parent asteroid. If you want an easy explanation, asteroid is a big flying piece of stone looking substance. First discovered asteroid is called Ceres and it's the biggest one we know so far. It's so big that it's even classified as dwarf planet. Every month are discovered about 5000 asteroids. Not all of these have names, only few of those which can be visible have one, the others have only numbers.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080125/ap_on_sc/earth_asteroid;_ylt=ApjPr5m15prDd5EiSOoI8Qes0NUE

by Zuzana Valkova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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