2022 AP7 is the largest asteroid “discovered in the past eight years that is potentially dangerous for Earth,” said research group Noirlab. The celestial body is about 1.5 kilometers in size.
2022 AP7 “is crossing Earth’s orbit, making it a potentially dangerous asteroid,” said study lead author Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science. However, the danger is low, since the asteroid normally crosses its orbit “very far” from Earth.
very difficult to predict
The threat is therefore that the trajectory of 2022 AP7, as with any asteroid, is slowly altered due to gravitational forces, particularly from planets. It is therefore difficult to make forecasts over a very long period of time.
2022 It will take AP7 five years to orbit the Sun in its current orbit, while still remaining several million kilometers from the blue planet at its closest point. The risk of a collision with Earth is purely hypothetical, but it would have “devastating effects on life as we know it,” Sheppard said. Dust thrown into the atmosphere would block sunlight, cooling the planet and triggering a mass extinction.
According to the researchers, most asteroids of this size have already been discovered. 2022 But AP7 was hiding in an area where sunlight is usually too bright for telescopes. Has been discovered 2022 AP7 is now joined by two other near-Earth asteroids using a high-tech instrument on the Victor M. Blanco telescope in Chile, originally designed to study dark matter.
Sheppard and his team’s findings were published in The Astronomical Journal. The other two asteroids do not pose any risk to Earth, they say, but one of them is the closest asteroid to the sun ever found.
In order to steer a dangerous asteroid past Earth in an emergency, NASA successfully carried out a test mission at the end of September: They deliberately allowed a space probe to collide with a harmless asteroid, thereby changing its trajectory.
Source: Nachrichten
