The world is watching as NASA tweaks the odds that asteroid 2024 YR4 will hit Earth. But how threatening is YR4, and how does it compare to other potentially hazardous space rocks?

New calculations indicate that the asteroid known as 2024 YR4 is now much less likely to hit Earth than earlier measurements had suggested. Late on 19 February, telescope observations of the object revised down the estimated chance of impact in 2032 from 3.1% — the greatest such threat ever recorded — to a still-worrying 1.5%.

The risk that an increasingly ominous asteroid dubbed 2024 YR4 will crash into Earth in seven years now exceeds the the threat once posed by Apophis.