Posted on 12/03/2019 10:44:29 AM PST by Red Badger
Humans have good reason to fear comets, asteroids and other massive space objects.
Now we’d like to add ‘mini-moons’ to the list of heavenly bodies we should be worried about.
Scientists have claimed our planet was recently hit by one of these mysterious rocks, which exploded in a gigantic fireball.
A mini-moon is an object which becomes entangled in Earth’s orbit as it’s zooming through space.
It will either whirl around the planet harmlessly forever, zoom off back off on its journey through the solar system or, in the worst case, smash into our planet.
‘Objects gravitationally captured by the Earth–Moon system are commonly called temporarily captured orbiters, natural Earth satellites, or minimoons,’ scientists wrote in a new study published in The Astromomical Journal.
‘TCOs are a crucially important subpopulation of near-Earth objects (NEOs) to understand because they are the easiest targets for future sample-return, redirection, or asteroid mining missions.
‘Only one TCO has ever been observed telescopically, 2006 RH 120, and it orbited Earth for about 11 months.’
However, it’s believed that an ‘extremely slow fireball’ which exploded over South Australia may have been a mini-moon.
It was picked up by six different detectors when it went kaboom in August 2016.
No-one was hurt in the incident, but it shows that the movement of objects through the region of space close to Earth is highly unpredictable.
If the rock had been larger, it could have done some major damage.
It’s very difficult to guess what’s going to happen to an object when it encounters Earth’s gravity because its movements are ‘chaotic in nature and predicting its pre-impact trajectory is very difficult’.
What this means is that if we saw a big asteroid in our planet’s orbit, we wouldn’t necessarily be able to say where and when it was going to hit Earth – or even if it was going to simply zoom around humanity’s homeworld and then travel off into space.
This year, Nasa has discovered two asteroids which could be on a collision course with our planet.
The space agency keeps a database called Sentry that contains details of all the space rocks with a chance of smashing into Earth.
This list is updated every time a new object that could hit humanity’s homeworld is discovered.
In the past six months alone, two separate rocks have been discovered which could crash into us.
The first is called 2019 ND7 and was observed in July.
This beast is almost 200 metres wide, which is large enough to wipe out an entire city.
A view of the devastation caused by the Tunguska event.
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It could be bigger than a meteor which detonated over Tunguska, Russia, in 1908 and flattened trees over an area of 770 square miles.
The ‘Tunguska event’ caused an explosion of 15-megatons – which is roughly 1,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
The rock which caused this mighty kaboom was between 60 and 1,000 metres wide, although most estimates indicate it was at the smaller size of this range.
Describing this incident, Nasa wrote: ‘Although a meteor the size of the Tunguska can level a city, metropolitan areas take up such a small fraction of the Earth’s surface that a direct impact on one is relatively unlikely.
‘More likely is an impact in the water near a city that creates a dangerous tsunami.’
Luckily, there is only a very small chance of the asteroid hitting Earth. Nasa has calculated the risk at 1 in 310,000, meaning there’s a 99.99968% chance the asteroid will miss the Earth.
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