People are freaking out over an asteroid ‘with the destructive power of three billion nuclear bombs’

Here’s the bad news - there, really, genuinely is an asteroid with the destructive power of three billion nuclear bombs, floating around our solar system.

But contrary to what you’ll read on conspiracy sites this week, the asteroid in question is NOT about to slam into Earth, killing us all.

The 2009ES asteroid (which is real) was spotted by Zhao Haibin at an observatory in Nanjing, China - but it passed Earth safely at 18.8 lunar distances.

But somehow, conspiracy sites are convinced that the 10-mile-wide rock is about to hit Earth - and soon.

It isn’t, of course - in fact, it has safely passed us, on September 5, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

NASA claims to have detected upwards of 97% of the ‘planet killer’ asteroids in the solar system - objects six or seven miles wide, similar to the ones which killed the dinosaurs.

In a statement last year NASA said, ‘As best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years.’

‘Bad Astronomy’ expert Phil Plait said that the entire Cold War arsenal of nuclear weapons would have amounted to a millionth of the power of the explosion that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The asteroid hit Earth at 40 times the speed of sound - causing an explosion seven billion times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb.