What are some of the largest extraterrestrial impacts to effect Earth? Learn what we've seen in history, and what is important to know today.
Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news 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. Its Earth-shattering speed caused the atmosphere to shred it 19 miles above the ground, creating an energetic shockwave equal to dozens of Hiroshima bombs. A 2013 paper in Science confirmed the damage. After emitting a blinding flash, the blazing rock's explosion rattled buildings, shattered windows, and hospitalized roughly 1,500 civilians with the waves of its shrapnel. Chelyabinsk's meteor was unusually large but not alone. These so-called "fireballs" enter our skies fairly often, rarely hitting the surface but nonetheless making quite an impact. Read More: Thousands Of Meteorites Hit Earth Each Year — Here's What They Bring 2. Sudbury Basin Impact Our next…