The “killer” killer “asteroid has a thin chance of crashing to the ground. Here’s what to know.
A colossal explosion in the sky, releasing energy hundreds of times greater than Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash almost as bright as the sun. Shockwaves strong enough to flatten all miles.
It may sound apocalyptic, but the newly discovered asteroid almost the size of the football field now has a greater than one percent chance of colliding with the country in about eight years.
Such an impact has the potential for destruction at the city level, depending on where it hits.
Scientists are not yet panickers, but they watch carefully.
“At this point, it’s’ a lot of attention, we get as many assets as we can watch as we can,” said Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the planetary society, for AFP.
What we know in 2024 and his chances of hitting the ground
Called 2024The asteroid was first observed on December 27, 2024, in the Observatory of the EL sauce in Chile. Based on their brightness, astronomers estimate that it is between 130 and 300 feet wide.
“Asteroid this size affects the Earth on average every few thousand years and can cause serious damage to the local region,” the European Space Agency in a statement.
On New Year’s Eve, he landed on the Kelly Fast desk, an acting planetary defense officers at the US Space Agency NASA, as a worrying subject.
“You get observations, they are coming down again. This one seemed to have the potential to hold on,” she told AFP.
The risk assessment continued to climb, and on January 29, international asteroid warning networks (IAVN), global co -operation of the planetary defense, issued a letter.
According to NASA’s latest budget Laboratory for a jet drive, there is a 1.6% chance that the asteroid will hit Earth on December 2, 2032.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 is now rated at level 3 of 10 to Turoro’s impact on the danger of dangerwhich is a “close encounter” that justifies the attention of astronomers and the public.
If affected, possible impact sites include the Eastern Pacific Ocean, North South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arab Sea and South Asia, the IAVM Memo State.
The 2024 YR4 follows a very elliptical, four -year orbit, passing through the interior planets before shooting next to Mars and towards Jupiter.
For now, he gets up from the ground – his next close passage will not reach 2028.
“The odds are very good that it will not only hit the ground, but at some point in the coming months to several years that probability will go to zero,” Betts said.
A similar scenario took place in 2004 with Apophis, an asteroid that initially predicted that there was a 2.7 percent chance of hitting Earth in 2029. Further observation excluded the influence.
“City Killer” category
The most notorious influence of asteroids occurred 66 million years ago, when the space rock launched a global winter, wiping dinosaurs and 75 percent of all kinds.
On the contrary, 2024 YR4 belongs to the “City Killer” category.
“If you put it through Paris or London or New York, basically wipe the whole city and part of the environment,” Betts said.
The best modern comparison is the 1908 Tunguska event, when the asteroid or comet fragment exploded over Siberia from 30-50 meters, lending 80 million trees on 770 square kilometers.
Like that impactor, it would be expected that in 2024 he would blow in heaven instead of leaving a crater on Earth.
“We can calculate energy … using mass and speed,” said Andrew Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
For 2024, the air explosion would be equal to about eight megaton TNT -a – more than 500 times more than the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
If it explodes over the ocean, the impact would be less concerned unless it happens near the coast that drives the tsunami.
It’s time to prepare
The good news, the stress of the expert is that we have enough time to prepare.
Rivkin conducted an investigation for NASA -na Mission Dart 2022who successfully pushed the asteroid from his stream using a spacecraft – a strategy known as “kinetic influence”.
The target asteroid did not represent a threat to the country, making it an ideal test subject.
“I don’t see why it wouldn’t work anymore,” he said. The bigger question is whether the main nations will finance such a mission if their own territory was not endangered.
There are other experimental ideas.
The lasers could evaporate part of the asteroids to create a thrust effect, pushing it out of the way. The “gravity tractor” is also theorized, a large spacecraft that slowly pushes the asteroid using its gravity move.
If everything else fails, a long warning time means that the authorities can evacuate the impact zone.
“No one should be afraid of that,” he said quickly. “We can find these things, make these predictions and have the possibility of a plan.”
However, NASA follows close approaches and calculates the prospects of these space rocks – including asteroids, meteors and meteorites – which affect the Earth.
“Most items near Earth have orbits that do not bring them very close to Earth and therefore do not pose a risk of influence, but a small part of them-talling potentially dangerous asteroids-for more attention,” according to A jet -drive website, which manages the center dedicated to studying items near the country for NASA.
