Astronomers have detected three asteroids near Earth, two of which pose a potential threat as “planet killers” due to their larger and dangerous size, but don’t worry, says a NASA expert, they shouldn’t hurt us.
According to findings published Monday in the peer-reviewed Astronomical Journal, the three asteroids – which belong to a group found in the orbits of Earth and Venus – were previously undetectable through the telescope due to glare and the brightness of the Sun.
However, an international space team of astronomers waited until dusk at an observatory in Chile to examine the asteroids using a dark energy camera from a 4-meter Víctor M. Blanco Telescope, according to the NOIRLab of the National Science Foundation.
The largest asteroid is the most dangerous object to pose a significant risk to Earth in the past eight years, researchers say. One of the asteroids, named 2022 AP7, is just under a mile wide but has an orbit that could match Earth’s path in the far future. A timeline is uncertain, however, according to the newspaper’s findings.
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The other two asteroids, 2021 LJ4 and 2021 PH27, are less likely to collide with Earth, the researchers say.
“Our twilight survey scours the area inside the orbits of Earth and Venus in search of asteroids,” said study lead author Scott S. Sheppard, an astronomer at the Earth & Planets Laboratory. the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, in a statement. “So far we’ve found two large near-Earth asteroids about 1 kilometer in diameter, a size we call planet killers.”
The study’s scientists determined that the asteroid most likely to cross Earth’s orbit “will currently stay a good distance from Earth,” largely because the sun would block it, as its moment of crossing the Earth’s orbit would be when the Earth is on the far side of the sun. .
If a half-mile-long asteroid ever connected to Earth, the results for the planet could be “devastating”, according to Sheppard, due to the impact of pollutants on the atmosphere.
“It would be a mass extinction event the likes of which have not been seen on Earth in millions of years,” Sheppard said.
Threat of asteroid hitting Earth ‘not dangerous’ says NASA expert
Although the asteroids seen could have devastating effects on the planet, don’t assume it will collide with Earth, said Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which does not did not participate in the study.
“We know this asteroid is not dangerous,” Chodas told USA TODAY. “It stays very far away from Earth, kind of locked in a residence that keeps it actually being one of the most distant asteroids that we categorize as potentially dangerous.”
The center tracks all space objects that pass through or approach Earth’s orbit around the sun. There are more than 30,000 near-Earth asteroids that have been discovered, but 857 of them are just over half a mile wide, according to NASA. According to the center’s database, asteroid 2022 AP7 is only expected to approach Mars and Jupiter within the next 145 years.
Chodas said the asteroid’s ability to cause destruction took away the main point of the investigation, as it’s a prime example of finding asteroids too close to the sun for us to see, which should continue to be done.
2021 PH27 is the closest known asteroid to the sun, according to NOIRLab’s release.
He added that NASA plans in 2026 to send a surveyor into space to observe asteroids in the region, hoping to detect anything that could pose a threat to Earth. By finding these asteroids, the agency could prepare plans similar to the DART mission, where a spacecraft crashed into an asteroid to change its trajectory.
“The most important thing in planetary defense is finding them and finding them with plenty of warning time,” Chodas said.
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