Asteroids miss with astronomers

The only thing that was particularly unusual about two asteroids that zipped past Earth September 8, astronomers say, was that anybody noticed them.

Such close approaches — one of the asteroids passed within 79,000 kilometers of Earth — actually happen several times a week, according to scientists’ calculations. Yet some media outlets described the close encounter as if it were a brush with Armageddon.

“Quite frankly, I don’t know why they’re making such a fuss about it,” says astronomer Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. “This is essentially nothing.”