Published on: 01/11/2022 – 04:02 Modified: 01/11/2022 – 04:00
Washington (AFP) – An international team of astronomers announced Monday the discovery of a large asteroid whose orbit crosses that of Earth, creating a small future possibility of a catastrophic collision.
The 1.5 kilometer (0.9 mile) wide asteroid, named 2022 AP7, was discovered in an area notoriously difficult to observe objects due to the Sun’s glare.
It was found along with two other near-Earth asteroids using a high-tech instrument on the Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile that was originally developed to study dark matter.
“2022 AP7 crosses Earth’s orbit, making it a potentially hazardous asteroid, but it is not currently on a collision course with Earth now or in the future,” said the lead author of the findings, astronomer Scott Sheppard. Carnegie Institution for Science.
The potential threat comes from the fact that, like any object in orbit, its trajectory will be slowly modified by the myriad gravitational forces, especially from the planets. Therefore, forecasts are difficult in the very long term.
The newly discovered asteroid is “the largest object that is potentially dangerous to Earth to be discovered in the last eight years,” said NOIRLab, a US-funded research group that operates several observatories.
In 2022 AP7 takes five years to circle the Sun under its current orbit, which at its closest point to Earth remains several million kilometers away.
So the risk is very small, but in the event of a collision, an asteroid of this size “would have a devastating impact on life as we know it,” Sheppard said. He explained that the dust thrown into the air would have a significant cooling effect, causing an “extinction event the likes of which has not been seen on Earth in millions of years”.
His team’s results were published in the scientific journal The Astronomical Journal. The other two asteroids pose no risk to Earth, but one is the closest asteroid ever found to the Sun.
About 30,000 asteroids of all sizes, including more than 850 over a kilometer across, have been cataloged in the vicinity of Earth, earning them the label “Near-Earth Objects” (NEO ). None of them threaten Earth for the next 100 years.
According to Sheppard, there are “probably 20 to 50 large NEOs left to find,” but most are in orbits that bring them into the light of the Sun.
In preparation for a future discovery of a more threatening object, NASA conducted a test mission in late September in which a spacecraft collided with an asteroid, demonstrating that it was possible to change its trajectory.
© 2022 AFP