Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – A giant “planet killer” asteroid lurking in the sun has finally been detected. It is estimated that one day this asteroid could hit Earth and cause a mass extinction.
Reported by Live scienceThis asteroid 0.9 miles wide or about 1.5 kilometers wide was named 2022 AP7 by astronomers. 2022 AP7 is one of several recently discovered space rocks or large rocks near the orbits of Earth and Venus.
A study published in The Astronomical Journal on Sept. 29 claimed that 2022 AP7 was discovered alongside two other near-Earth asteroids using the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, South America.
“So far we have found two large near-Earth (NEA) asteroids about 1 km or 0.6 miles wide. We call these dimensions planetary killers,” said study lead author Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington., DC, USA.
Currently, 2022 AP7 crosses Earth’s orbit which is on the opposite side of the Sun, but scientists say that over the course of thousands of years, the asteroid and Earth will slowly begin to cross the same closest point, increasing the likelihood of a catastrophe.
To find asteroids, astronomers trained the 4-meter Cerro Tololo Víctor M. Blanco dark-energy camera telescope in the inner solar system. The sun’s glow made observations impossible for most of the day, so the researchers only had two 10 minutes each night to make observations.
“Only about 25 asteroids in full orbit within Earth’s orbit have been discovered to date due to the difficulty of observing near glare from the Sun,” Sheppard said.
“There are likely only a few NEAs of similar size to be discovered, and these large undiscovered asteroids likely have orbits that keep them in the orbits of Earth and Venus most of the time.”
NASA tracks the positions and orbits of some 28,000 asteroids, tracking them with the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a series of four telescopes capable of scanning the entire night sky every 24 hours.
In addition, the space agency marks any space object within 120 million miles or approximately 193 million km of Earth as a “near-Earth object” and classifies any large object within 4.65 million miles or 7.5 million. km from Earth as ‘potentially dangerous’.
By predicting the trajectories of all near-Earth objects beyond the end of this century, NASA says Earth will face no danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years.
However, that doesn’t mean astronomers can stop looking for asteroids. Because, in March 2021, a bowling ball-sized meteor exploded over Vermont with a force of 440 pounds or about 200 kilograms of TNT. Additionally, the 2013 meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, produced an explosion roughly equivalent to up to 500 kilotons of TNT or 26 to 33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb and injured approximately 1,500 people. .
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