Nope, not fake news.
An asteroid roughly the width of a football field will pass close enough to Earth this year to warrant the attention of the European Space Agency (ESA), though the space rock's actual threat to the planet is minimal.
The asteroid, known as 2006 QV89, is one of 870 objects on the ESA’s risk list, which tracks “all objects for which a non-zero impact probability has been detected.” The asteroid is ranked fourth on the current risk list, but it is the only object in the top 10 with a chance of impacting Earth this year.
The ESA's risk list organizes near-Earth objects by their Palermo scale rating, which measures potential impact risks. 2006 QV89's value is -3.63. According to the Center for Near Earth Object Studies; values on the scale "less than -2 reflect events for which there are no likely consequences."
The asteroid is one of many near-Earth objects that astronomers are tracking, and it’s roughly the size of a football field. It won’t collapse civilization (I know some out there are bummed about that), but if it hits, it could cause some damage.
It’s probably very likely not going to strike the Earth. The probability is 1 in 7,000---one way to look at that is you’re slightly more likely to die from excessive cold (perhaps, cold bought on by post-asteroid impact winter? But this asteroid isn’t big enough—in case you’re curious, here’s what big ones can do). September 9th is a Monday however and if it did, it’d give someone quite the case of the Mondays, that’s for sure.
Anyway, I marked this my calendar.
To be perfectly honest, there is so much bad news all the time now that 2019 me is barely fazed by the possibility that an asteroid might strike the earth in just a few months, I mean intellectually I’ve always known that could happen. But we live in a country that currently has concentration camps, a president who is---a whole lot of things, and Nazis literally on the march again. An asteroid? Pfft.
Also, this gives the Daily Mail something else to write about as last week they were flipping out over Yellowstone, again, and I’m sure at some point in the next few weeks they’ll realize there are volcanoes within 1,000 kilometers of London, again. Short memories at that newspaper, there.
At any rate, the chance is small. Stay tuned.