This asteroid, named 2022 AP7, “crosses the path of the Earth, which makes it a potentially dangerous asteroid”, explained to AFP Scott Sheppard, astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for science. However, it does not currently threaten to hit us, because it remains “very far” from the Earth when it crosses its orbit, he immediately reassured.
The threat comes from the fact that like any asteroid, its trajectory will be slowly modified due to the gravitational forces exerted on it, in particular by the planets. Forecasts are therefore difficult over the very long term.
It is the “largest potentially dangerous object for the Earth discovered in the last 8 years”
It is the “largest potentially dangerous object for the Earth discovered in the last eight years”, according to a press release from the American NOIRLab, which operates several observatories.
This NEO (near-Earth asteroid) takes five years to orbit the Sun, and is now several million kilometers from Earth at its closest.
The risk is therefore very hypothetical, but in the event of a collision, an asteroid of this size would have “a devastating impact on life as we know it”, explained Scott Sheppard. The dust thrown into the atmosphere would block the light of the Sun, cooling the planet and causing a mass extinction.
The discovery was made thanks to the Victor M. Blanco Telescope, in Chile, and its DECam instrument, initially developed to study dark matter. The results were published in the scientific journal The Astronomical Journal.