‘Planet Killer’ Asteroid Spotted That Poses Distant Risk to Earth
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/science/asteroid-planet-killer.html
Excerpt: Last year, in the hope of finding asteroids cloaked by excessive sunlight, an international team of astronomers co-opted a camera primarily designed to investigate the universe’s notoriously elusive dark energy. In an announcement Monday based on a survey first published in September in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers announced the discovery of three new light-drowned projectiles. One of them, 2022 AP7, is roughly a mile long, and its orbit crosses Earth’s path around the sun, getting as near as 4.4 million miles to Earth itself — uncomfortably close by cosmic standards (although far more distant than Earth’s moon). That makes 2022 AP7 “the largest potentially hazardous asteroid found in the last eight years or so,” said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and an author of the study. ...“There is an extremely low probability of an impact in the foreseeable future,” said Tracy Becker, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who was not involved with the study. But the gravitational pull of objects around the solar system — including our own planet — ensures that Earth-crossing asteroids don’t dance the same way forever. ...“Over time, this asteroid will get brighter and brighter in the sky as it starts crossing Earth’s orbit closer and closer to where the Earth actually is,” Dr. Sheppard said. It’s possible that “way down the line, in the next few thousand years, it could turn into a problem for our descendants,” said Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast who was not involved with the study. And if, in the unluckiest of timelines, 2022 AP7 ultimately impacts Earth? “This is what we call a planet killer,” Dr. Sheppard said. “If this one hits the Earth, it would cause planetwide destruction. It would be very bad for life as we know it.”.… See also article in The Guardian.