Scientists have discovered a 'planet killer' asteroid. The space rock 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.
Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, and an author of the study, stresses there is no evidence to suggest the asteroid will ever impact Earth, and even if it were to threaten the planet, that would happen thousands, if not millions of years in the future.Researchers using the Dark Energy Camera in Chile discovered the space rock by observing during twilight — a crucial time for ground-based telescopes to find possibly dangerous asteroids usually lost in the glare of the Sun.
The part of the sky where 2022 AP7 was found is particularly challenging to search for asteroids within because astronomers only have two 10-minute windows each night for the survey of the area. "Our twilight survey is scouring the area within the orbits of Earth and Venus for asteroids," Sheppard said in the press release. "So far we have found two large near-Earth asteroids that are about 1 kilometer across, a size that we call planet killers."NASA and other space agencies have been focusing on searching for and characterizing possibly hazardous asteroids for years.
Scientists think they've found most of the asteroids near Earth in the size range of 2022 AP7, but other, smaller yet still potentially devastating space rocks have gone undiscovered. "Less than half of the estimated 25,000 NEOs that are 140 meters and larger in size have been found to date," according to
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