New Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Discovered
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https://www.axios.com/2022/11/01/planet-killer-asteroid-found
Scientists have discovered a "planet killer" asteroid nearly a mile long within the orbits of Earth and Venus.
Why it matters: The space rock - named 2022 AP7 - poses no immediate threat to Earth, but its orbit crosses the planet's, making it an important object for scientists to keep an eye on in the future.
What they found: 2022 AP7 is thought to be about 0.9 miles long - wide enough that if it hit Earth, a wide swath of the planet would feel the effects.
Details of the newfound asteroid and two others were published in the Astronomical Journal in September and announced in a news release Monday.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac8cff https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2226/
New Potentially Hazardous Asteroid DiscoveredArthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story
[...] "2022 AP7 crosses Earth's orbit, which makes it a potentially hazardous asteroid, but it currently does not now or anytime in the future have a trajectory that will have it collide with the Earth," said lead author of the findings, astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
The potential threat comes from the fact that like any orbiting object, its trajectory will be slowly modified due to myriad gravitational forces, notably by planets. Forecasts are therefore difficult on the very long term.
The newly-discovered asteroid is "the largest object that is potentially hazardous to Earth to be discovered in the last eight years," said NOIRLab, a US-funded research group that operates multiple observatories.
2022 AP7 takes five years to circle the Sun under its current orbit, which at its closest point to Earth remain several million kilometers away.
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