This year we're getting asteroids for all occasions. First the Halloween asteroid decided to swing by for some trick-or-treat action, and now a Christmas Eve asteroid wants to fill all our stockings with carbonaceous chondrites1.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.