So you know how on a bright day the sun’s glare hits you right in the eye so you can’t see anything? Now try to imagine that on a planetary scale. Astronomers have announced they have discovered 3 previously unknown near-Earth asteroids hiding in the glare of the Sun. And one of them is a giant; a true “Planet Killer.”
It is nearly a mile (1.5 kilometers) across, which makes it big enough to cause planet-wide destruction if it were to hit the earth. Thankfully it won’t be any kind of threat to our planet for about 100 or so years. And at the rate we are going the planet may have been destroyed by humans already.
The search for large asteroids coming near earth has amped up in the past few years. More and more scientists seek to catalog them, which is a nearly impossible task. There are so many parts of space we still know nothing about and we certainly can’t observe them at the moment. The goal of this research is to identify potentially dangerous asteroids as early as possible. Which will hopefully give us a chance to avoid catastrophe. This is what missions like DART were all about. The issue is something like DART isn’t big enough to knock a mile-wide asteroid off course.
Thankfully the threat from mile-or-so-wide “planet killer” asteroids. Currently, the biggest unknown threat to earth comes from medium-sized “city killer” asteroids. This is because there are probably only a few really big undiscovered near-Earth asteroids. “In total, there are about 1,000 asteroids one kilometer or larger in size near the Earth, of which 95 percent have been found,” lead author of the paper detailing this discovery, Scott Sheppard (Carnegie Institution for Science), explains. “The likelihood of a big asteroid hitting us is very, very low.”
Bruce Willis has yet to comment on this finding.
