2d ago

Risk of large asteroid striking Earth falls to 1.5%

www.dw.com Risk of large asteroid striking Earth falls to 1.5% – DW – 02/20/2025

NASA cuts calculations of asteroid large enough to wipe out a whole city striking Earth in half. The global astronomical community expects the odds of an asteroid to hit Earth in December 2032 to eventually fall to zero.

Summary

NASA has lowered the estimated risk of asteroid 2024 YR4 striking Earth in December 2032 to 1.5%, down from 3.1% a day earlier. The European Space Agency's (ESA) estimate stands at 1.38%.

The asteroid, 40-90 meters wide, could cause significant city-level destruction but not a global catastrophe.

The projected impact corridor spans the Pacific, South America, Africa, and South Asia.

NASA also estimates a 0.8% chance of the asteroid hitting the Moon.

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65 comments

I feel like hitting the moon could fuck us up even worse long term, with effects on the ocean?
- Much much much much larger objects have hit the moon in the past
- Well we'd lose the tides, which would devastate ocean life. We'd lose moonlight, which would devastate nocturnal animals. The axial tilt would change, so seasons would become more even, devastating plants that rely on seasonal cycles, or become more extreme, devastating everything.
  The book Seveneves explores this scenario, but is mostly about how humanity moves to space to survive.
  
  The moon would shrug that rock off without noticing. Any changes in measurements (mass, velocity, etc.) would be minuscule.
  
  Could it even completely obliterate the moon? Just not being tidally locked would be awful, but completely changing its trajectory/orbit and probably fuck up our atmosphere with debris seems more likely
  
  It's probably not big enough to shatter the moon, but enough to at least alter its orbit. I'm not enough of an astrophysicist to say how much. I haven't looked up the forces involved, so I can't even give a ballpark estimate.
  
  It technically would alter the moons orbit, but not by a lot. This asteroid would impact with roughly the energy of a nuclear bomb, which sounds like a lot, but on the scale of our moon it's negligible.
  A rough estimation given my limited understanding of physics is that to change the moon's orbit by 1 m/s, you would need to impart something like 10²² joules of energy into it. Wikipedia says that if this asteroid hits the moon, the impact energy will be around 10¹⁶ joules. I don't know how much you know about exponents, but 10¹⁶ is approximately 0% of the way to 10²², and that's just change of 1 m/s
  Of course, someone who actually understands physics is free to correct me if I'm wrong
  
  Here's the upside: new species will evolve that can take better advantage of the new environment.

65 comments