Astronomers have revealed that they have identified a new asteroid believed to be the size of a football field. The size, however, is not the headline to this breaking story. The researchers are stating that there is more than a 1% chance of the asteroid crashing into Earth in the year 2032.
Astronomers have identified a new asteroid that’s the size of a football field. This discovery is significant considering that the asteroid has more than a 1% chance of crashing into Earth on December 22nd, 2032.
While the odds may seem very low, The International Warning Asteroid Network (IAWN) issued its first-ever Potential Asteroid Impact Notification for the asteroid now known as 2024 YR4. The IAWN is a global collaboration that began in 2013 to monitor and track space objects that could impact Earth.
IAWN Manager Tim Spahr is the one who emphasized that even with the low percentage, it’s still a rare occurrence that should be taken seriously. Spahr said this announcement will put the astronomical community on alert so that they can focus on collecting the most amount of information on the asteroid.
“Hitting the 1% impact probability is a rare event indeed.”
The IAWN initially put out the notification on January 29th, reporting a 1.3% chance of impact in 2032. The data is from the NASA JPL Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS) and its European counterpart, according to reports from NPR.
As of Friday, however, the probability hit 1.6%. CNEOS Director Paul Chodas said that time is running out to refine calculations for its orbit and truly know how likely impact will be.
“We need larger and larger telescopes to observe this object. By mid-April, it will be too faint to be detected.”
Based on the asteroid’s current and prospected location, the next opportunity to study it won’t be until 2028.
Researchers measure the probability of the asteroid’s impact in a way that parallels how the National Weather Service determines the probability of a hurricane making landfall, according to Chodas. “It’s kind of analogous to having a major city such as New Orleans in the cone of uncertainty of a hurricane,” Chodas says.
“The worldwide community is watching this and taking notice that it’s reached this threshold,” says Kelly Fast, the acting planetary defense officer for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
“We do want to keep an eye on it. We do take it seriously, but we want to put it in perspective … There’s still a very low probability that it would even impact the Earth at all.”
2024 YR4 is a large asteroid that has the potential to cause “considerable localized damage were it to impact a populated area,” Scott Neuman wrote for NPR.
CNEOS uses something known as the Torino Scale to rate the asteroid’s destructive potential. They’re currently ranking the asteroid a 3 on a scale of 0 to 10, which Chodas says “does not happen very often.”
Anne Virkki, a research fellow at the University of Helsinki, said that if 2024 YR4 hit above a city it “would definitely break windows.”
“You can estimate the size based on the brightness observed without knowing precisely how reflective it is … but there is still some constraint to how reflective asteroids are in general,” Virkki says.
Astronomers think that 2024 YR4 is between 40 meters and 90 meters in diameter.
“If 2024 YR4 hits, it could be more like 8 to 10 megatons. A blast wave from such an impact would have a radius of several miles,” says Carson Fuls, director of the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
