On this day

November 8, 2011

Revisit the news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.

Historical Context for November 8, 2011

In 2011, the world population was approximately 7,110,923,765 people[†]

Notable Deaths

Heavy D

2011Heavy D, Jamaican-American rapper, producer, and actor (born 1967)[†]

Dwight Arrington Myers, known professionally as Heavy D, was a Jamaican-American rapper, record producer, and actor. He was the leader of Heavy D & the Boyz, a group that included dancers/hype men G-Whiz and "Trouble" T. Roy, as well as DJ and producer Eddie F. The group maintained a sizeable audience in the United States through most of the 1990s. The five albums the group released included production mainly by Teddy Riley, Marley Marl, DJ Premier, Myers's cousin Pete Rock, and "in-house" beatmaker Eddie F. Myers also released four solo albums and discovered Soul for Real and Monifah.

Bil Keane

2011Bil Keane, American cartoonist (born 1922)[†]

William Aloysius Keane was an American cartoonist best known for the newspaper comic strip The Family Circus. He began it in 1960 and his son Jeff Keane continues to produce it.

Historical Events

Potentially hazardous object

2011The potentially hazardous asteroid 2005 YU55 passes 0.85 lunar distances from Earth (about 324,600 kilometres or 201,700 miles), the closest known approach by an asteroid of its brightness since 2010 XC15 in 1976.[†]

A potentially hazardous object (PHO) is a near-Earth object – either an asteroid or a comet – with an orbit that can make close approaches to the Earth and which is large enough to cause significant regional damage in the event of impact. They are conventionally defined as having a minimum orbit intersection distance with Earth of less than 0.05 astronomical units and an absolute magnitude of 22 or brighter, the latter of which roughly corresponds to a size larger than 140 meters. More than 99% of the known potentially hazardous objects are no impact threat over the next 100 years. As of February 2025, just 21 of the known potentially hazardous objects listed on the Sentry Risk Table could not be excluded as potential threats over the next hundred years. Over hundreds if not thousands of years though, the orbits of some "potentially hazardous" asteroids can evolve to live up to their namesake.

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Headlines from November 8, 2011