A gargantuan asteroid measuring between 1,000 and 2,430 feet in diameter, is due to fly past Earth on November 1.
The asteroid, named 2022 RM4, is traveling at speeds of roughly 52,500 miles per hour, and is expected to sail past the Earth at a distance of 1,427,801 miles.
In comparison, the moon is only 238,900 miles away, and our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus, is 38 million miles away at its closest point. The One World Trade Center building measures 1,792 feet tall at its tip.
Asteroids are small rocky objects that also orbit the Sun. NASA estimates there are 1,113,527 asteroids present in our solar system.
"Asteroids are "bits of a planet that didn't happen" that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Asteroid Belt. However, as they are relatively small, asteroids can be disturbed quite easily, so they can develop orbits that cross those of planets," Jay Tate, the director of the Spaceguard Center observatory in the U.K., told Newsweek.
Most asteroids range in size from 329 miles in diameter to around 30 feet.
"We believe they formed in the asteroid belt and got ejected by impact (in this case the asteroid is a fragment of the large impacted asteroid), or their orbits were destabilized due to the presence of Jupiter resonances in the belt," Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, told Newsweek.
Despite its relative proximity to the Earth on a solar system scale, the chances of this asteroid or others like it hitting the Earth are miniscule.
"This asteroid will not hit us. We already have a good measurement of its orbit and know that it will pass nearby us in November 2095 but still at 0.01AU [one percent of the distance from the Earth to the Sun]," Marchis said. "Nothing to be worried about."
"What is interesting in the case of this asteroid is simply the fact that it's a very large one and we recently discovered it, implying that our survey of the large population of near earth asteroids is not yet fully complete. New facilities coming soon like Vera Rubin could help us finishing those surveys"
According to Gretchen Benedix, an astrogeologist at Curtin University, the odds of an asteroid like 2022 RM4 hitting the Earth are one per 100,000 years, depending on size.
"So in the next 1,000 years, the odds of an asteroid of this size hitting are 0.001% (or 0.01 per 1,000 years)," she told Newsweek.
The effects of asteroid impacts vary hugely based on their size, their speed and the angle at which they collide with a planet. In the very unlikely event of an asteroid the size of 2022 RM4, the damage would be immense.
"A 740m-rocky asteroid like this will impact our surface bringing 30,000 Megatons of TNT, producing a 10km [6.2 mile] impact crater on earth (600m deep) and a 7.6 Richter magnitude earthquake," Marchis said.
Benedix agreed: "In all cases, a crater will form – but the composition of the asteroid will be the defining property for the size – from 3.8 to 15.5 kilometers [2.4 to 9.6 miles] diameter. Within 100 kilometers of the impact (into rock), there will be radiation effects from almost nil to radiation burns; a range of seismic effects; airblast effects ranging from glass windows shattering to buildings collapsing; clouds of gas and dust launched into the atmosphere," she said.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. ... Read more
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