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No, it wasn’t the Tesla Roadster found wandering through space, but unexpectedly (if we consider that no one saw it coming), an asteroid the same size as a car brushed the Earth doing the flyby closest to our planet never recorded.
Apparently, the asteroid flew almost 3,000 kilometers from the center of the Earth (exactly 2,950 km) last Sunday. The figure is so close that had never been registered before, just as explain asteroid trackers from the Sormano Astronomical Observatory in Italy.
Its small size also tells us that this space rock might not have posed any danger to mortals if it had hit the planet. Actually, the most disturbing thing about 2020 QG, as they have formally called it, is that astronomers had no idea until after its passage. As explained from NASA’s Near Earth Object Studies:
The asteroid approached undetected from the direction of the sun. We didn’t see it coming. Yesterday’s approach is the closest on record, if some known asteroids that have actually impacted our planet are ruled out.
To put in context how close it was to the planet, those nearly 3,000 kilometers from the center of the Earth mean that it could have been less than 1,600 kilometers above our heads at its closest point, lower in altitude than almost all satellites. artificial in orbit.
La NASA esteem than 2020 QG It has a diameter of about 3-6 meters, hence it is about the size of a car. About this, Tony Dunn, the creator of the website, explained hours later orbitsimulator.com, than “asteroid ZTF0DxQ passed less than 1/4 Earth’s diameter yesterday, making it the closest known flyby that did not hit our planet”.
Additionally, Dunn did so by sharing the following animation, an accelerated simulation showing the approximate orbital path of 2020 QG as it proceeded at a speed of approximately 12.4 kilometers per second:
This animation shows QG 2020 flying over the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. However, the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center calculation a slightly different trajectory. The representation of the group, as we see below, suggests that the asteroid flew over the Pacific Ocean hundreds of kilometers east of Australia:
—Be that as it may, and if there is entered to our planet, it would probably have exploded in the atmosphere, creating a bright fireball and unleashing an airborne explosion equivalent to detonating several dozen kilotons of TNT, albeit in the air, several kilometers above the ground, which would have been little more than a pyrotechnic show from the surface of the Earth.[[Forbes, NASA, Sormano Astronomical Observatory]
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