Imagine speeding through space: scientists have found an asteroid with dimensions similar to the Empire State Building.
This asteroid, which recently zoomed past Earth, has attracted the attention of NASA astronomers because of its bizarre long shape. The space rock — which may have whizzed past to clarify that not all asteroids are approximately spherical — is more than three times as long as it is wide.
To get a sense of its size, scientists have estimated that the rock is about 1,600 feet by 500 feet, roughly comparable to that of the world-famous landmark that towers 100 stories above New York.
“Of the 1,040 near-Earth objects observed by planetary radar so far, this is one of the longest we’ve ever seen,” said Lance Benner, chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement (opens in a new tab). . .
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The asteroid, known as 2011 AG5, flew by Earth at a safe distance of 1.1 million miles on Feb. 3, according to the US Space Agency. But this approach gave astronomers the first attempt to study its size, rotation, surface area, and silhouette in detail since the object was discovered 12 years ago.
“It’s one of the longest [asteroids] We’ve seen.”
The image above is a collage of six images taken by the Goldstone Solar System Radar(Opens in a new tab) antenna dish in California of the long object. There was no sign of King Kong clinging to the towering rock, but astronomers made a few other observations: it’s dark charcoal in color, appears to be scooped on one side, and rotates slowly every nine hours.
The asteroid takes about twice as long to orbit the sun as Earth and won’t make a close flyby of that planet until 2040, when it could get close to 670,000 miles, according to NASA. That’s close in terms of the cosmos – space is a big place, after all – but it’s still three times further than the Moon is from Earth.
A 2012 rendering of asteroid 2011 AG5, showing it moving beyond the orbit of Mars, coming as close to the Sun as halfway between Earth and Venus. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/NEOPO
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Millions of space rocks orbit the sun. They are the rocky debris left over from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. Most of this ancient debris is too far away to pose a threat to this planet. Most are in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but occasionally rocks are nudged into the inner solar system, relatively closer to Earth.
There are no known asteroids on an impact course with Earth. However, scientists are watching exactly 30,000 large objects (Opens in a new tab) out there and estimate that about 15,000 are still waiting to be discovered. Astronomers use powerful telescopes to scan the sky and find about 500 new sizable space rocks in the neighborhood of Earth’s solar system each year.
“An asteroid impact is an extremely rare event,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, last year. “Maybe once a century there’s an asteroid that we would be really concerned about and want to distract.”
“Maybe once a century there’s an asteroid that we would be really concerned about and want to distract.”
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But even smaller rocks can cause immense destruction. An impact from an asteroid about 100 to 170 feet wide could destroy a small town, according to NASA (opens in a new tab). Ten years ago this week, on February 15, 2013, an undetected meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia(Opens in a new tab), causing a disaster that affected six cities and injured 1,600 people. The rock was only 60 feet wide.
Nations are developing warning systems and countermeasures should an asteroid or comet enter an orbit that could endanger civilization. As a test, in November 2022, NASA launched a spacecraft known as the DART mission to intentionally collide with a harmless asteroid in space and attempt to alter its trajectory. The $330 million exercise was successful and proved NASA’s ability to thwart a potentially dangerous space rock in the future.
Shortly after AG5 was discovered in 2011, some people feared (Opens in a new tab) that it could pose a threat to the planet decades in the future. Armed with little information about its orbit at the time, scientists couldn’t make accurate estimates of its position to reassure people.
Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (Opens in a new tab) at the lab, said the asteroid “became a poster child” when early observations showed it had a slim chance of a future Earth impact.
“Continuous observations of this object ruled out any possibility of an impact,” he said in a statement.
Source: mashable.com
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