“Are Planet-Killer Asteroids a Threat? New Study Reveals Future Risks”

CNN Indonesia

Monday, May 22 2023 07:44 WIB

Jakarta, CNNIndonesia —

Asteroid large hit Earth 66 million years ago to destroy the dinosaurs and change climate global. Is it possible that this incident could happen again?

Research published in The Astronomical Journal and available on server preprint arXiv found that none of the 1 kilometer wide asteroids (which are commonly called planet killers) that pass near Earth will hit Earth in the next millennium.

“This is good news,” said University of Colorado Boulder researcher Oscar Fuentes-Muñoz, who led the study.

The asteroid that is 1 kilometer in diameter is smaller than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, which is estimated to be 10 kilometers in diameter.

However, according to the Global Challenges Foundation a 1 kilometer wide asteroid could still cause continental-scale devastation and potentially kill hundreds of millions of people.

The United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has compiled a catalog of about 962 near-Earth objects of this size, which likely represent about 95 percent of space rocks in this size category that pass near our planet.

Scientists usually estimate an asteroid this size crashes into Earth roughly every 600,000 to 700,000 years, although some researchers think these impacts could potentially occur more frequently.

Fuentes-Muñoz and his co-researchers used a new method to estimate the orbits of large near-Earth objects that could cause collisions so that they could peek 1,000 years into the future, far longer than the typical asteroid estimates.

They examined which orbits could potentially bring asteroids closer to Earth than the average distance between the Earth and the Moon.

The most dangerous object, the 1.3-kilometer-diameter rocky asteroid named 1994 PC1 has a 0.00151 percent chance of approaching lunar orbit within the next millennium.

Quoted from LiveSciencethe object is 10 times more likely than any other asteroid in the data set, the MIT Technology Review reported.

Objects smaller than 1 kilometer can also be dangerous, only on a smaller geographic scale.

The Tunguska event, which leveled 2,150 square kilometers of Siberian forests in 1908, was caused by the explosion of a 60-meter-diameter space rock in the atmosphere. In populated areas, such an explosion would be devastating and cause loss of life.

In 2013 a smaller meteor caused by an asteroid fragment about 18 meters in diameter shattered windows and damaged buildings in Chelyabinsk, Russia, and injured nearly 1,500 people.

NASA is now working to catalog asteroids 140 meters or larger in size, capable of destroying a city.

The catalog is about 40 percent done, says Fuentes-Muñoz “There is hope that the new survey of the sky will give us a much higher level of completeness.”

(can/arh)