A massive asteroid the size of the Empire State Building is zooming towards our planet this weekend.
The asteroid, named 2024 WY70, is estimated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to be roughly 820 feet in diameter, with JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) forecasting that it could be between 656 and 1443 feet across.
New York's Empire State Building is about 1,250 feet tall, while the Eiffel Tower is about 1,060 feet tall.
Despite its size, we won't be able to spot 2024 WY70 as it zips past our planet.
"Asteroids are generally too faint to have been detected by the current techniques and surveys, so it's very hard to see by our naked eyes," Minjae Kim, a research fellow in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Warwick, told Newsweek.
2024 WY70 is expected to pass us on January 18 at a distance of 3,920,000 miles, which is about 16 times further away than the moon's 238,900-mile orbit around our planet.
"Asteroids are debris left over from the early formation of the Solar System," Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the U.K., previously told Newsweek.
"They exist on a wide range of orbits due to gravitational interactions between them and other bodies in the solar system."
Asteroids are mostly found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but the gravity of planets especially Jupiter, can nudge asteroids onto trajectories that cross Earth's orbit.
CNEOS tracks a large number of asteroids all around the solar system, classifying them by size and distance from our planet. 2024 WY70 is a Near-Earth Object or NEO, due to it coming within about 120 million miles of the sun, or 30 million miles of Earth.
Due to its large size, 2024 WY70 is also classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHAs) or potentially hazardous object (PHOs), which must be at least 460 feet across and come within around 4.7 million miles of the Earth.
"Asteroids and comets with a perihelion distance (closest to the Sun) less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU), or approximately 120 million miles/194 million km, are called near-Earth objects -- or NEOs," Svetla Ben-Itzhak, an assistant professor of space and international relations at Johns Hopkins University, previously told Newsweek.
"Astronomers consider a near-Earth object a threat if it has an Earth minimum orbit intersection distance of 0.05 AU (around 4.7 million miles or 7.5 million km) or less and is at least 140 meters [460 feet] in diameter. Those are known as potentially hazardous objects (PHOs)."