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Rest easy : Earth in all likelihood wo n’t be creamed by a orca asteroid in the next 1,000 days .
fresh research accepted for issue in The Astronomical Journal and usable on the preprint serverarXiv.orgfinds that none of the kilometer - all-inclusive ( 0.6 mile ) asteroids that travel near Earth are likely to hit the planet in the next millenary .
This asteroid will probably not kill you.
" It ’s beneficial news,“Oscar Fuentes - Muñozfrom the University of Colorado Boulder , who led the study , toldMIT Technology Review .
An asteroid about 0.6 mile in diam is low than the one thatwiped out the dinosaur , which is think to have evaluate about 6.2 Swedish mile ( 10 kilometer ) in diam . But an 0.6 - mile - all-inclusive asteroid could still have continental - scale desolation , according to theGlobal Challenges Foundation , potentially killing hundreds of gazillion of people .
NASAhas compile a catalogue of about 962 near - Earth objects of this size , in all likelihood representing about 95 % of space rocks in this size family that pass off near our planet . scientist typically estimate that asteroids of this size strike Earth approximately every 600,000 to 700,000 twelvemonth , though some researchersargue that these impacts have happened more often .
Fuentes - Muñoz and his confrere used new method of estimating which orbit of large near - Earth objective could ensue in a potential hit , enabling them to peer 1,000 long time into the future — far longer than distinctive asteroid forecast . They examined which orbits had the potential to bring in an asteroid nigher to Earth than the modal distance between Earth and the moon .
The most severe objective , a stony asteroid about 0.8 mile ( 1.3 km ) in diameter called 1994 PC1 , has only a 0.00151 % chance of approaching within the moonlight ’s domain in the next millennium . And that ’s 10 time more probable than any other asteroid in the dataset , MIT Technology Review reported .
– Could an asteroid destroy Earth ?
– Largest asteroid ever to hit Earth was double as large as the rock that pop off the dinosaurs
– Dinosaur - killing asteroid did not trigger a long ' nuclear wintertime ' after all
Objects smaller than a kilometer can also be dangerous , just on smaller geographic scales . The Tunguska event , which flattened 830 square mile ( 2,150 square kilometers ) of Siberia forest in 1908 , was triggered by the blowup of an approximately 200 - foot - diameter ( 60 meters ) outer space rock music in the air . In a populated area , such an explosion would be annihilating . In 2013 , a smaller powerhouse , because of an asteroid fragment close to 59 foot ( 18 MiB ) in diameter , blew out windows and damaged buildings in Chelyabinsk , Russia , injuring almost 1,500 multitude .
NASA is now working to catalog asteroid of 459 feet ( 140 m ) or larger , which are capable of destroying a city . That catalog is about 40 % complete , Fuentes - Muñoz told MIT Technology Review : " [ T]here ’s hope that new sketch of the sky will give us a much higher completeness rate . "
