A group of American scientists warned that a giant asteroid could intersect Earth, adding that the asteroid they recently identified is the largest discovered in more than eight years.
The team revealed that the width of the asteroid, which was called 2022 AP7, is 1.5 km, adding that its potential impact will be felt across multiple continents.
“So far, we’ve found two large near-Earth asteroids about 1 kilometer in diameter, the size we call ‘planet killers’,” Scott Sheppard, an astronomer in the Earth and Planetary Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science and lead author of a paper describing the discovery, said in a press release. . But only 2022 AP7 has an orbit that makes it dangerous to Earth, according to scientists.
The asteroid “planet killer” was hidden somewhere between Earth and Venus, which makes it difficult to detect. Astronomers have to look in the direction of the sun to study this region, and the latest orbiting telescopes such as James Webb or Hubble cannot be used in such studies because the sun’s glare would burn its sensitive optics.
Sheppard explained: “Only about 25 asteroids have been discovered that have orbits that completely intersect Earth’s orbit so far due to the difficulty of observing near the sun’s glare.” In this particular case, the scientists made the discovery using the dark energy camera of the 4-meter Victor M Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo International Observatory in Chile.
And although the inner solar system remains largely uncharted territory when it comes to asteroids, scientists believe that this region contains few potential hazards for Earth.
“It is likely that there are only a few near-Earth asteroids of similar sizes left,” Sheppard said, adding that most of them likely have orbits that will not put them on a collision course with Earth. It’s also unclear when, if it does, 2022 AP7 could pose an acute hazard to Earth.
However, according to Space.com, astronomers are already observing as many as 2,200 potentially dangerous asteroids more than a kilometer across. And the media indicates that such space rocks are likely to pose a danger to the entire planet, as even an asteroid 50 meters wide can destroy an entire city like London if it explodes over its center.
And there is an asteroid called “Apovis” that has an orbit dangerously close to Earth. And in 2020, scientists warned that it could hit the planet in 2068. Later that same year, the Planetary Science Division of the American Astronomical Society said that the 370-meter space rock could enter the orbits of some of our communications satellites at some point in time. early 2029.