One asteroid “planet killer” hiding in the glow of the Sol has finally been detected and the giant space rock could collide with Earth someday.
The 1.5 km-wide “potentially dangerous” object, called 2022 AP7, is one of several large space rocks that the astronomers recently discovered near the orbits of the Land and from Venus.
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Currently, 2022 AP7 crosses Earth’s orbit while our planet is on the opposite side of the Sun, but scientists say that over thousands of years, the asteroid and Earth will slowly begin to cross the same closest point, increasing so the chances of an impact catastrophe.
The asteroid, discovered along with two other nearby Earths by the Inter-American Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile, was described in a study published on September 2. The Astronomical Journal.
“So far, we’ve found two large asteroids close to Earth about 1km across, a size we call ‘planet killers’,” said lead author Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC. DC, USA, in a statement.
Planet killer asteroids are space rocks large enough to cause a global mass extinction event if they collide with Earth.
To find the asteroids, astronomers trained the Dark Energy Camera of the Cerro Tololo Víctor M. Blanco telescope 4 meters deep in the solar system.
The sun’s glare makes observations impossible for most of the day, so the researchers only had two ten-minute windows at dusk each night to make their observations.
“Only about 25 asteroids with orbits completely inside Earth’s orbit have been discovered to date due to the difficulty of observing near the Sun’s brightness,” Sheppard said. “There are probably only a few close-to-Earth asteroids of similar size to be found, and these large undiscovered asteroids likely have orbits that keep them within the orbits of Earth and Venus most of the time.”
NASA tracks the positions and orbits of approximately 28,000 asteroids, tracking them with the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a suite of four telescopes capable of scanning the entire night sky every 24 hours.
The space agency marks any space object within 193 million km of Earth as “near-Earth object” and classifies any large body within 7.5 million km of our planet as “potentially dangerous”.
Since ATLAS went online in 2017, it has detected more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets.
Two of the asteroids detected by ATLAS, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, hit Earth, the first exploding off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and the second falling near the border between Botswana and South Africa. Fortunately, these asteroids were small and did not cause any damage.
NASA has estimated the trajectories of all objects near the Earth beyond the turn of the century. According to NASA, Earth faces no known danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years.
But that doesn’t mean astronomers think they should stop looking. In March 2021, for example, a meteor the size of a bowling ball exploded over Vermont with the force of 200 kilograms of TNT.
Even more dramatically, a 2013 meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia generated an explosion of approximately 400-500 kilotons of TNT, or 26 to 33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb, injuring approximately 1.5 thousand people.
Space agencies around the world are already working on possible ways to deflect a dangerous asteroid if one were to happen. On September 26, NASA’s DART spacecraft redirected the non-dangerous asteroid Dimorphos off course, altering the asteroid’s orbit by 32 minutes in the first test of Earth’s planetary defense system.
China also suggested that it was in the early stages of planning an asteroid redirect mission. By launching 23 Long March 5 rockets on asteroid Bennu, which will swing 7.4 million kilometers from Earth’s orbit between the years 2175 and 2199, the country hopes to deflect space rock from a potentially catastrophic impact with our planet.
with information from Live science
Featured Image: Vadim Sadovski / Shutterstock
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