Ever wished upon a shooting star? Though beautiful, shooting stars are also signs of the cosmic shooting range through which Earth is currently whizzing. The ammunition consists of countless space rocks, microscopic to mountainous, moving impossibly fast. The few that end up scoring a direct hit are called meteorites.
Organizations like NASA's CNEOS track thousands of these near-Earth objects. Occasionally, candidates like the building-sized asteroid 2024 YR4 make headlines. In April 2025, it was announced that the asteroid has a remote chance of hitting the moon in 2032.
If humanity ever did come under threat from an extinction-level impact, pioneering experiments like the DART mission of 2022 have shown promise in diverting asteroids. But what has happened in the past when our planet faced much larger visitors from the cosmos? And how does asteroid 2024 YR4 stack up to some of astronomy’s biggest extraterrestrial impacts?
1. Chelyabinsk Meteor
Compared to ancient giant impacts, this meteor was small fry, but it still packed a devastating punch. On February 15, 2013, a 66-foot-wide hypersonic fragment called a superbolide hurtled above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.
