An information center in the United Kingdom reported an asteroid could possibly hit Earth in 2014 last week. By Friday, however, the threat of the end of the world was retracted.

This sort of report is not uncommon, said Guillermo Gonzalez, assistant professor of physics and astronomy.

“Once every five or six months, there’s a report of an asteroid that could hit the Earth at some point in the future,” Gonzalez said. “Then, when new observations are obtained, it’s shown that the probability drops to zero.”

Such was the case last week, when a preliminary sighting report by the United Kingdom-based Near Earth Objects Information Center led to reports that the end was near.

News sources, despite the center’s warning that the odds of the asteroid hitting Earth were one in nearly one million and that further tracking would give scientists a better idea of the object’s path, ran with a more interesting version of the story, announcing the estimated date as the end of the world.

The asteroid, labeled 2003 QQ47, estimated to be about 1.2 kilometers wide, was deemed capable of releasing the energy equivalent of millions of nuclear bombs, should it find its way to Earth.

“Whenever a new asteroid is found and someone reports that it has a probability of hitting the Earth, wait a few days,” Gonzalez said. “That was the problem with this one. They reported it too quickly.”

However, while this object turned out to be no danger to life on Earth, the threat is still very real, said Joseph Eitter, the manager of the Erwin Fick Observatory, which is operated by Iowa State University.

Eitter estimated if QQ47 were to land on Earth, it could possibly wipe out a small country. A larger object could result in a nuclear winter effect.

Gonzalez said given a long enough timeline, an Earth-impact is inevitable. Asteroids and meteors cruising dangerously close to Earth are fairly common, and at least one significant collision has taken place in recent history, an atmospheric explosion in Tunguska region in Siberia in 1908 that flattened trees for miles and brought enough sediment into the atmosphere to turn the sky over the impact area red.

“It’s happened before,” Gonzalez said. “Every few years, an asteroid comes within the distance of the moon, literally passing between it and the Earth.”

For a better understanding of how often celestial bodies come crashing into our planet, Gonzalez said people should look to the moon, which is pockmarked with craters from impacts both tremendous and tiny.

“Because the moon is so close to Earth, the lunar cratering record shows us the history of impacts on Earth,” he said. “We would have received about the same impact rate and damage over time.”

He said the impact rate of Earth is about 25 times greater than the moon’s rate.

However, this is no reason for humanity to despair, Gonzalez said. Unlike Hollywood’s recent portrayals, even an asteroid that will eventually crash into Earth does not necessarily mean an end to life as we know it.

“The nice thing about asteroids is that, unless the object is discovered incredibly late, the predictions we have are always for decades in the future,” he said. “There’s plenty of time to prepare.”

Deliverance from a doomsday rock wouldn’t require blasting it to bits, but merely changing its course slightly. He estimated that could be accomplished with the use of contemporary science.

“The slight movement will translate into a big change in its position several orbits later around the sun,” he said. “So you could just land a rocket on it, start the engines and push it enough out of the way.”

“But,” he added, “that wouldn’t make for a very spectacular movie.”

— The Associated Press contributed to this article.