A 'city-killer' asteroid might hit Earth - how worried should we be?

4 days ago 60

WASHINGTON - A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the Sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles.

It may sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than one per cent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years.

Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes.

Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely.

“At this point, it’s ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s get as many assets as we can observing it’,” Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, told AFP.

Rare finding

Dubbed 2024 YR4, the asteroid was first spotted on Dec 27, 2024, by the El Sauce Observatory in Chile. Based on its brightness, astronomers estimate it is between 40m to 90m wide.

By New Year’s Eve, it had landed on the desk of Kelly Fast, acting planetary defence officer at US space agency Nasa, as an object of concern.

“You get observations, they drop off again. This one looked like it had the potential to stick around,” she told AFP.

The risk assessment kept climbing, and on January 29, the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a global planetary defence collaboration, issued a memo.

According to the latest calculations from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is a 1.6 per cent chance the asteroid will strike Earth on Dec 22, 2032.

If it does hit, possible impact sites include over the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia, the IAWN memo states.

2024 YR4 follows a highly elliptical, four-year orbit, swinging through the inner planets before shooting past Mars and out toward Jupiter.

For now, it is zooming away from Earth – its next close pass will not come until 2028.

“The odds are very good that not only will this not hit Earth, but at some point in the next months to few years, that probability will go to zero,” said Dr Betts.

A similar scenario unfolded in 2004 with Apophis, an asteroid initially projected to have a 2.7 per cent chance of striking Earth in 2029. Further observations ruled out an impact.

Destructive potential

The most infamous asteroid impact occurred 66 million years ago, when a six-mile-wide (9.6km) space rock triggered a global winte...

Read Entire Article