Stargazers are invited to watch a giant asteroid described as "potentially dangerous" wizzing past Earth at 12.37km/s through a webcast replay.

The asteroid, 2000 EM26, flew past our planet at around 2am GMT and its journey was recorded by the Slooh Space Camera, which streamed the event live online.

Since the broadcast, slooh.com has uploaded a webcast replay of the event with information about the asteroid's journey.

Its appearance was viewed as remarkable by many as it arrived almost a year to the day as the Russian meteorite that crashed down onto Chelyabinsk on 15 February last year.

Speaking of last night's event with space.com, Bob Berman, astronomer with Slooh, said: "On a practical level, a previously-unknown, undiscovered asteroid seems to hit our planet and cause damage or injury once a century or so, as we witnessed on 20 June, 1908 and 15 February, 2013.

"Every few centuries, an even more massive asteroid strikes us – fortunately usually impacting in an ocean or wasteland such an Antarctica. But the ongoing threat, and the fact that biosphere-altering events remain a real if small annual possibility, suggests that discovering and tracking all NEOs, as well as setting up contingency plans for deflecting them on short notice should the need arise, would be a wise use of resources."

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2000 EM26 measured around 270m in diameter and came within 3,380,000km from Earth's surface – or 8.8 lunar distances.

Discussing last year's meteorite, Nasa recently said tracking near-earth asteroids has been a "significant endeavour" for the organisation, with over 10,700 discovered to date.

Nasa also announced it is developing an Asteroid Redirect Mission to identify, capture and redirect an asteroid to a safe orbit by the 2020s: "The mission represents an unprecedented technological feat, raising the bar for human exploration and discovery, while helping protect our home planet and bringing us closer to a human mission to one of these intriguing objects."