Climate and science reporter
A large asteroid known as 2024 YR4 has grabbed headlines this week as scientists first raised its chances of hitting earth, then lowered them.
The latest estimate says the object has a 0.28% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, significantly lower than the 3.1% chance earlier in the week.
Scientists say it is now more likely to smash into the Moon, with Nasa estimating the probability of that happening at 1%.
But in the time since 2024 YR4 was first spotted through a telescope in the desert in Chile two months ago, tens of other objects have passed closer to Earth than the Moon, which in astronomical terms sounds like a near miss.
It is likely that others, albeit much smaller, have hit us or burned up in the atmosphere but gone unnoticed.
This is the story of the asteroids that you never hear about – the fly-bys, the near-misses and the direct hits.
The vast majority are harmless. But some carry the most valuable clues for unlocking mysteries in our universe, information we are desperate to get our hands on.
Asteroids, also sometimes called minor planets, are rocky pieces left over from the formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
Rocks routinely orbit close to Earth, pushed by the gravity of other planets.
For most of human history, it has been impossible to know how close we have come to being struck by a large asteroid.
Serious monitoring of objects near Earth only started in the late 20th
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