Asteroid alarm systems were put into operation last week after an asteroid was discovered to be on a collision course with Earth less than two hours after it was discovered by a shocked astronomer.

The asteroid, named 2022 EB5, was discovered by Krisztián Sárneczky, an astronomer at the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary, who was spending a quiet night looking at telescope images when he noticed an unidentified specification of light.

Since it was not particularly bright or moving too fast, Sárneczky decided to leave the telescope to continue scanning the skies before returning to the same place in the sky about half an hour later.

And the light specifications were gone.

Sárneczky noticed him again in another place, this time appearing as a belt in the sky and looking like he was traveling very fast.

As a result, Sárneczky was puzzled.

He wondered how the object could have accelerated so much.

5th Earth impactor from Piszkéstető Obs: 2022 EB5


Yesterday at 19:24 UT an unknown moving objects of 17 mag was found by K. Sárneczky on images from 0.6-m Schmidt telescope.

Acquired data 30 min later showed that it was going to collide with Earth in 2 hours time.

pic.twitter.com/NdLUcF1MnM

- Stefan Kurti (@KurtiStefan) March 12, 2022

Thus, using object coordinate data, Sárneczky made a calculation of when it would be likely to hit Earth if it were indeed an "incoming" asteroid.

The answer was an hour and a half.

"I have dreamed of such a discovery many times before," the astronomer wrote on the website of the Hungarian Astronomical Society.

"It seemed so impossible to me…".

Sárneczky uploaded his data to a site, which activated alarm systems at the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA.

It was soon determined that the asteroid was fortunately, relatively small.

In addition, the predicted location of its "impact" was on the Norwegian Sea, which means that damage to a populated area seemed impossible.

So Sárneczky shot some pictures of the asteroid as it approached.

His last photograph of the asteroid is said to have been taken 10 minutes before the collision when it was about 11,000 kilometers away from Earth, at which point it was supposed to be traveling at about 16 kilometers per second.

Speaking to Newsweek, Sárneczky called the asteroid discovery his proudest moment as an astronomer, despite having already discovered a comet so far this year.

Asked if he was worried about the asteroid impact, he said: "Not really, because even after the first observations it seemed to be a relatively small body.

"Even if the strike had taken place in a populated area, it would not have caused any damage."

According to the ESA, no visual discovery of the asteroid was found until Tuesday, probably because its location of the impact was too far away.

However, evidence of an atmospheric impact was collected from Iceland and Greenland-based ultrasound detectors.

These detectors can detect very low frequency sounds caused by natural phenomena such as earthquakes or asteroid impacts.

It is not uncommon for small asteroids to hit Earth.

Those with dimensions similar to EB5 2022 can be expected to collide with our planet every year, says ESA.

However, there were only five instances of the discovery of such an asteroid before the collision.

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Telegraphy

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