Well, this one is fake just because of the title given to it. Articles on asteroid impacts share this as an example of an asteroid that could hit Earth. It’s most often zoomed in like this:
See these search results Google image search - journalists and even science magazines use this image to report any asteroid story of any size. Even reports of a flyby or impact by an asteroid a few tens of meters across.
It’s a zoom in of this larger image by Don Davis (artist) and it is a scientifically accurate artist’s impression except for one very important detail:
which is also frequently used in the articles: Google image search
It’s actually an artist’s impression of a Planetoid crashing into primordial Earth by Don Davis. The last impact on Earth of a planetoid this big was getting on for four billion years ago when the solar system was still settling down after its formation.
The largest asteroids to hit Earth since then are only of the order of 10 km across or so. That’s for the last more than three billion years, throughout the inner solar system, including our Moon, all the way from Mercury out to Mars and its moons, all the craters from asteroids significantly larger than 10 km date to well over three billion years ago.
Apparently Jupiter protects us from the very largest asteroids and planetoids like this one.
To put it in perspective, if you had an image of the Earth with 1600 pixels resolution for its diameter, which is a common resolution for an HD computer screen, then a ten kilometer diameter asteroid would be a little over 1 pixel in diameter.
You can understand why they don't use realistic asteroid sizes in the images. You wouldn't be able to see the impactor at all!
This is a more accurate image, used in many news stories for a typical medium sized asteroid - where they show it glowing but don't show the impactor, and with a close up zoom in on the Earth.
That's the image that was widely used for reporting 2013 TV135 the roughly 450 meters diameter asteroid that we now know will be over three quarters of the distance to the sun away from Earth on that date.
For a larger, 10 km asteroid, this is an accurate artist's impression, from NASA.
About 70 impactors this large or larger have hit Earth since 3.8 billion years ago.
Also check out the image by Don Davis, of Southwest Research Institute from Ancient Asteroids Kept Pelting Earth in a "Late-Late" Heavy Bombardment.
After a big impact like this, not much would survive in the near neighbourhood of the strike, out to a range of order of hundreds of kilometers. But far away, many would survive the immediate impact. While after an impact by a planetoid, then the oceans would boil and the Earth’s surface would go molten and quite possibly it might even be sterlized of all life. There’s quite a difference.
I think it’s one of the reasons many think we would go extinct after an asteroid impact, and even that it might destroy all life on Earth. But many creatures did survive the Chicxulub impact, including birds, turtles, crocodiles and alligators, dawn sequoia, many sea creatures, and mammals of course. We surely would also with our technology able to survive anywhere from the Arctic to the Kalahari with the minimum of tools, made of wood, bone and stone.
These impacts are also very rare, only one chance in a million to have one like this in this next century - and reduced to probably more like 1 in 100 million now that we have found all the 10 km and larger asteroids that do close flybys of Earth and proven that none of them will impact Earth in the next century. That only leaves the much rarer long period comets, and we’d most likely have a year or so of warning for those.
See also my Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them (free online version)
Also available on kindle as Giant Asteroid Is Headed Your Way? : How We Can Detect and Deflect Them (Amazon)
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