Scientist stunned by the asteroid of the city who just lost the earth

Scientist stunned by the asteroid of the city who just lost the earth. People are the only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.

Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters who wanted to know more about a big asteroid that had just crossed the Earth and could not understand “why everyone was alarmed.”

“I thought everyone was worried about something that we thought was going to happen,” said Duffy, senior scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, Washington Post.

Forecasts had predicted that a pair of asteroids would be relatively close to Earth this week.

Then he looked for the details of the space rock song called Asteroid 2019 OK

He appeared “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observation astronomer, told the Washington Post.

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According to NASA data, the steep rock was wide, with an estimated width of 57 to 130 meters (187 to 427 feet) and was moving rapidly along a path that led to approximately 73,000 kilometres (45,000 miles) distance. Earth.

Scientist stunned by the asteroid of the city who just lost the earth he missed

“We were quickly surprised,” said Brown, an associate professor in Australia at the School of Physics and Astronomy at Monash University.

and one thing more is that Later he said People only realize what happened long after it happened on our side.

The presence of the asteroid was only discovered earlier this week by independent astronomy teams in Brazil and the United States.

Information on its size and trajectory was announced a few hours before its passage on Earth, said, Brown.

“My morning complacency shook me,” he says. “It’s likely to be the largest asteroid that has been so close to Earth for many years.”

So, how did the event go almost unnoticed?

First, there is the problem of size, said Duffy. The asteroid 2019 OK is a considerable piece of rock, but it is not as big as those that can cause an event such as the extinction of the dinosaurs.

More than 90% of these asteroids, which are more than one kilometre wide or more, have already been identified by NASA and its partners.

“Nothing of this site is easy to detect,” Duffy said of the 2019 asteroid, OK. “You really rely on the sun’s rays and even the closest approach was barely visible with a pair of binoculars.

Brown said that “the eccentric orbit” and the speed of the asteroid were also likely factors in what made the observation difficult.

Its “very elliptical orbit” takes it “from beyond Mars to the orbit of Venus”, which means that the time spent near the Earth where it is detectable is not long, he said. declared.

When he approached Earth, the asteroid was travelling at about 24 kilometres per second or about 54,000 mph.

In contrast, other recent asteroids that have crossed the Earth have recorded speeds of 4 to 19 kilometres per second (8,900 to 42,500 mph).

” and It’s been weak for a long time or one thing Brown said of the 2019 asteroid, OK.

“In a week or two, it starts to be clear enough to detect it, but someone has to look in the right place, and once it’s finally recognized, things go quickly, but it’s fast approaching, so we only discovered it very early before the flyover. ”

Last-minute detection is another sign of how much space remains to be ignored and a thought-provoking reminder of the real threat posed by asteroids, Duffy said.

“We should all be frankly worried,” he said. “It’s not a Hollywood movie, it’s a clear and present danger.”

Duffy said that astronomers have a nickname for the type of space rock that is so close to Earth: “The city’s killer asteroids”. If the asteroid had touched Earth, most of it would probably hit the ground, causing devastating damage, Brown said.

“He would have fired like a very large nuclear weapon” with enough force to destroy a city, he said. “A lot of megatonnes, maybe in the 10-megaton TNT stadium, so that’s something you do not have to mess with.”

In 2013, a much smaller meteor, about 20 meters wide, or the size of a six-story building, crashed over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk and sparked a wave of intense shock which caused the collapse of the roofs. windows and dropped. 1200 injured.

The last space rock to hit Earth

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