Give up, everyone. A large rock in space has the best Halloween costume this year.
NASA’s infrared telescopes captured the above image of the object called 2015 TB145 on Friday. It whizzed past Earth at around 1 p.m. EST on Saturday, but wasn’t visible to the naked eye. And because humans love finding Earth-bound things on the terrain of celestial bodies (see: Pluto’s heart), scientists determined that it looked like a skull:
Spooky.When 2015 TB145 was first discovered earlier this month, scientists weren’t sure whether it was an asteroid or a comet. Asteroids are airless hunks of rock and metal too small to be called planets, originating from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Comets are made of rock, ice, and frozen gases and orbit mostly in two areas—the Kuiper Belt, outside of Neptune’s orbit, and the Oort Cloud, at the very edge of the solar system—until the gravitational pull of a nearby planet knocks them out. Both are leftover material from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
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