Nasa confirms newly discovered asteroid could hit Earth

Nasa has been tracking a newly discovered asteroid that has a small chance of coming into contact with Earth.

Earlier this month, the space agency announced that their new discovery had a one in 1,2000 chance of coming into contact with Earth.

A few days later, the '2023 DW' asteroid's chance of impact increased to one in 710. This then rose to the odds of one in 560.

While it may sound like a heightened risk, there's still a "very small chance" of impact. The odds are expected to decline once the agency is able to gauge clearer observations.

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"Often when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future," Nasa said on Tuesday (7 February).

They shared that the potential impact could happen on Valentine's Day 2046.

Nasa analysts announced they will continue to monitor their new discovery and provide updates once they have more data.

It comes after Nasa scientists shared a dark theory as to why they believe aliens haven't contacted Earth.

In the paper titled 'Avoiding the ‘Great Filter’: Extraterrestrial Life and Humanity’s Future in the Universe', researchers suggested that all intelligent life will wipe itself out before evolving to make contact with civilisation.

Their theory is called "the Great Filter," which scientists describe as a "phenomenon that wipes out civilisations before they can encounter each other, which may explain the cosmic silence".

"The key to humanity successfully traversing such a universal filter is… identifying [destructive] attributes in ourselves and neutralising them in advance," it continued.

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