What are the chances of hitting the Earth by a great asteroid?

A week ago new Vera C. Rubin Observatory He published its first photos. It also contained a video of all discovered asteroids. In just 10 hours, the Simonyi Survey telescope from The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) The camera captured over 2,000 previously undetected asteroids.

It is a reminder that although there is a lot of space in space, our solar system is still happening.

Asteroids are rocks and remains left of creating our solar system. There are two main areas in which the majority are located. The first is the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The second is Kuiper's belt, except for Neptune's orbit.

But there is still much more.

Scientists estimate it roughly 44 tons of meteoric remains falls towards the ground every day. That's right: every day.

The good news is that most of them are burning in our atmosphere.

But what are the chances that a much larger object is on a collision course with the ground?

“The earth was hit in the past by large asteroids and probably, if we waited long enough, something would happen. But the risk is very, very small,” said Paul Weigert, a professor at the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy of the Western University in London at ONT.

“So none of the asteroids we know today has a significant chance to hit the Earth over the next 100 years. This is a pretty healthy time horizon.”

However, there is no guarantee that something that has not been undetected so far is not on the way.

“When we go beyond this, there is always a chance that we can of course discover new asteroids and they become unpredictable, but more difficult to predict detailed details, at longer distances,” added Weigert.

The importance of being serious

There are many sky scanning groups looking for an asteroid, and Weigert said that Vera C. Rubin's observatory raises the search like never before.

“Vera Rubin telescope will really revolutionize the way this work is done. I think that even people who knew what to expect knew that it was falling, were impressed by the way Lsst-Rubin was able to really immerse himself and start finding these things,” he said. “So it will be a very impressive discovery machine.”

NASA found more than 1.4 billion asteroidsAnd he thinks he identified more than 95 percent asteroid one kilometer or larger In our solar system.

It is estimated that the Rubina Observatory will discover 89,000 objects of almost Earth and 3.7 million main asteroids.

Now the asteroid hitting is really a matter of opportunities.

Smaller objects, such as asteroids with a diameter of about 10 meters Earth's influence once every decade. Although not the end of the planets, the windows can break. The Chelyabinsk meteorite, which exploded over Russia in 2013, had twice as much as it actually broke the windows, which hurt about 1,500 people.

Watch Press report on the subject of meteorites from 2013, which hit Russia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grrdswhqhy0

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The larger the rock, the less often they affect the ground. For example, the 140-meter asteroid affects the ground about once every 1000 years, and one that has about one kilometer affects the Earth about 700,000 years. Asteroid this size would be destructive.

It is believed that the one who killed dinosaurs was about 10 to 15 kilometers. It is estimated that these effects occur about once every 100 million years.

Jim Freemantle is the project manager at OSiRIS-REX Laser Altimeter Project at York University in Toronto. Osiris-Rex was a mission of sample reclamation to Bennu Asteroid. He has a small piece of asteroid in his laboratory.

He believes that it is important to generally follow and better understand asteroids.

“I do not consider that I am not sleeping, this is an asteroid for dinosaurs that will destroy us. We have other things to worry about,” he said.

“I think it is something that you can think about, measure, where or looking for, where asteroids are because they sometimes sneak us.”

He also said that he was excited, that he had these observation systems, as well as plans to reject any asteroid that can be on a collision course with the ground.

In particular, he noticed NASA Double mission of redirecting asteroids (DART) to a double system. The goal was to check if we could move the asteroid, throwing something into one.

The spacecraft crashed into one of the asteroids to see if it can change the orbit. This was recognized success. And now the European Space Agency has Space ship on the way back to the system To get more control observations.

Asteroid to influence the moon?

Weigrt and his team recently published a reprint study around 2024 YR4, a newly discovered 60 meter asteroid, which at some point this year aroused some concerns about her chances that it would affect the ground in 2032.

But now we were given a green light to stop worrying, because astronomers slightly improved the orbit of asteroids and it turns out that it will not affect the ground.

However, there is still a four -percent chance that it will hit the moon.

In the new study of Weigert and his colleagues calculated How can it look.

He said that usually, when the asteroid hits the moon or any planet without an atmosphere, he creates a crater about 10 times larger.

As for 2024 YR4, if it hits the moon, rocks and debris will blow up with the majority back on the lunar surface. But some of these tiny rocks could reach earth.

“If he hit the right place, a lot of material could be delivered to the ground in the form of basically small moon rocks, perhaps a centimeter size or millimeters, ideal for making shooters, falling stars, and this would cause quite a wonderful meteor shower on earth for several days, depending on again and exactly where the moon hits.”

But this would also pose a threat to satellites.

But Weigert predicts that as the orbit is further improved – which will not take place only in 2028 at the earliest, because it is currently behind the sun – the chances of it will fall to zero.

Weigert also explained why a better estimation on the asteroid path takes time.

“You can see that he moves in the sky very, very well, but in fact it is very, very difficult to say how far it is,” he said.

“Only after watching it for a long time and you know about the laws of physics and how gravity affects orbit, you can really improve it and say:” Good, if it follows the laws of physics, which it should do, that he travels along this path. “

Asked if he loses sleep because of the possibility of hitting the asteroid, Weigert simply said, “No.”

“We have seen most of the really dangerous asteroids and we are still working to find so many other slightly less, but still a bit dangerous asteroids, and especially with something like the Rubin observatory, now when this task goes to the end even faster than it was.”