
A meteor trail is seen on Chelyabinsk, Russia, Friday, February 15, 2013, in a photo taken by a mobile phone camera. The object crossed the sky over the region of the mountains of the Urals Russia, causing a wave of shock and injuring hundreds of people, many of whom were injured by broken glass.
Sergey Hametov / AP
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Sergey Hametov / AP
Do you feel lucky? Astronomers say that a newly identified Space Rock, potentially as large as a football field, is better than 1% chance of crashing on earth on December 22, 2032.
These chances may seem good enough (assuming you hope for a miss International Warning Asteroid Network (IAWN), global collaboration began in 2013 to monitor and follow space objects that could have an impact on earth Potential notification of asteroid impact For the asteroid, known as 2024 YR4, says the director of the IAWN Tim Spahr.
The notification aims to put the astronomical community on alert to collect as much information as possible on the quasi-terre object (NEO) in question.
“Hitting the probability of an impact of 1% is indeed a rare event,” explains Spahr.
What is the probability of hitting?
When IAWN issued its notification on January 29, it reported a 1.3% chance of 2024 YR4 impacting the land in 2032, based on data from the NASA JPL Center for Neo Studies (Cneos) and his European counterpart. But, this Friday, this probability had increased a little, to 1.6%.
And time is exhausted to refine the calculations for its orbit and excrete or exclude an impact, says the director of CNEOS, Paul Chodas.
“We need increasingly large telescopes to observe this object. In mid-April, he says,” he will be too weak to be detected. “”
After that, the next opportunity to study it will not come back before 2028.
Although the current odds are like a chance in 63 at a direct blow, there is still a much better chance of missing, underlines Chodas.

The way the probability of an impact is determined is very similar to how the National Weather Service determines the chances that a hurricane are affecting landing.
“It is a little similar to having a big city like New Orleans in the cone of the uncertainty of a hurricane,” explains Chodas.
However, while astronomers are giving further the accuracy of their orbital calculations for 2024 years, their chances of a earth strike “could fall to zero almost any day,” he said. “But we don’t know that.”
Kelly Fast, the acting planetary defense officer of the NASA planetary defense coordination office, thinks it is important to keep the perspective.
“The global community looks at this and takes note that it is affected by this threshold,” she said.
“We want to watch him. We take it seriously, but we want to put it in perspective … There is always a very low probability that it even affects the earth.”
What is the size and how much damage could they do?
The 2024 year old asteroid is large, but he is certainly not a dinosaurs killer. This could cause considerable localized damage if it had an impact on a populated area.

To assess its destructive potential, astronomers use something called Torino scale. The CNEOS currently classify the asteroid A 3 on a scale of 0 to 10. “This does not happen very often,” explains Chodas. In fact, nothing is compared to this since Apophis, an asteroid of cruise size discovered in 2004. It was initially considered as a 2.7% chance of hitting the earth in 2029, but this probability was then lowered . In 2021, Astronomers said The earth was sheltered from Apophis for at least 100 years.
If 2024 years hit above a city, he “would certainly break the windows,” said Anne Virkki, a researcher at the University of Helsinki. Virkki used the radar to follow near terrestrial objects from the ARECIBO Observatory in Puerto Rico to the 900-ton equipment platform above the main radioelescope in a spectacular way collapsed in 2020destroying the instrument.
To determine the size of an asteroid, astronomers rely on the brightness of the object as a criterion. The brighter objects are larger. They place higher and lower limits on the size in part because it is not easy to say how reflected asteroid.
“You can estimate the size according to the light observed without knowing precisely how reflected it is … But there is still a certain constraint to the way asteroids were generally reflecting,” explains Virkki.
In the case of 2024 years, astronomers believe that it is between 40 meters and 90 meters (130 feet at around 300 feet) in diameter. In comparison, the Meteor who struck ChelyabinskRussia on February 15, 2013, was estimated at around half of this size (17 to 20 meters or 56 to 66 feet) in diameter. The Chelyabinsk object injured some 1,500 people and caused damage to thousands of buildings in several cities.

A view of the wall of a local zinc factory which was damaged by a shock wave of a meteor of the city of Urals of Chelyabinsk, on February 15, 2013.
Oleg Kargopolo / AFP via Getty Images
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Oleg Kargopolo / AFP via Getty Images
The energy released on Chelyabinsk was estimated equivalent to around 500 kilotons of TNT – about 30 times more than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. If 2024 YR4 struck, it could be more like 8 to 10 megatons, explains Carson son, director of the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona. A wave of explosion of such an impact would have a radius of several kilometers.
The notification of the IAWN indicates that in the event that it struck the earth, the “corridor at risk of impact” extends “through the eastern peaceful ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Oman Sea and South Asia. “
This includes a lot of ocean notes, fuls.
“We have spent 8 to 10 nuclear test megatons in the Pacific and this did not create world tsunami or anything nearby.”