There’s a massive asteroid heading for Earth at 26,000 miles per hour

A massive asteroid travelled at some speed past Earth (26,000 miles per hour to be exact) and is the same size as 10 buses.

It is called 2013 WV44 and is believed to be up to 524 feet (160 metres) in diameter, according to NASA.

To put this size into further perspective, it is the same size as 10 buses stacked end to end and it's also bigger than the London Eye.

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The asteroid was expected to fly past Earth at 9 am BST, travelling at 11.8 km per second, or over 26,000 miles per hour and has been classed by NASA as a "near-Earth object (NEO)," and is being tracked by the space agency.

NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighbourhood, as per NASA.

An asteroid that's bigger than the London Eye zoomed past Earth this morning.iStockphoto by Getty Images

While the asteroid headed towards Earth at some speed, there was no need to worry as the closest it got to us was predicted to be 2.1 million miles - so still pretty far away.

(That's about nine times further away than the moon).

“Although it is not a PHA [potentially hazardous asteroid], it is relatively large,” Japanese astronomer Atsuo Asami tweeted.

The circumstance in which an asteroid can be classed as "potentially hazardous," is if it comes within 4.65 million miles of Earth - and on this occasion, this particular asteroid (2013 WV44) did not.

Elsewhere, there is an asteroid with so much precious metal it’d make everyone a billionaire and an asteroid the height of the Eiffel Tower previously hurtled past Earth.

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