'Planet Killer' Covered by the Sun Has the Power to Destroy the Earth

The research team of the Earth and Planetary Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science in the United States published a research report on October 31, announcing the discovery of three large near-Earth objects that had not been detected before because the brightness of the sun was too bright Planets, the largest of which, at 1.5 kilometers in diameter, are large enough to be called "planet killers", and their orbits may stagger with Earth's. According to the research team's report published in The Astronomical Journal on October 31, the researchers used the "Dark Energy Survey" (The Dark Energy Survey) in Chile to discover that the asteroid 2022 AP7 is this The largest of the "Potentially Hazardous Objects" (PHO) that may threaten the Earth discovered in 8 years, it and a group of asteroids "hide" within the orbit of the Earth and Venus, an area that has always been limited by the brightness of sunlight. Home is hard to see.

A mockup of an asteroid hiding in the sun's light.

(taken from the official website of the National Optical Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory)

[Compiled by Guan Shuping/Comprehensive Report] The research team of the Earth and Planetary Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science in the United States published a research report on October 31, announcing that it had previously discovered that the sun was too bright to be damaged. Of the three large near-Earth asteroids detected, the largest one is 1.5 kilometers in diameter, large enough to be called a "planet killer", and its orbit may be staggered with the Earth.

According to the research team's report published in The Astronomical Journal on October 31, the researchers used the "Dark Energy Survey" (The Dark Energy Survey) in Chile to discover that the asteroid 2022 AP7 is this The largest of the "Potentially Hazardous Objects" (PHO) that may threaten the Earth discovered in 8 years, it and a group of asteroids "hide" within the orbit of the Earth and Venus, an area that has always been limited by the brightness of sunlight. Home is hard to see.

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Most telescopes for asteroid exploration use nighttime observations of celestial bodies in the outer solar system. For celestial bodies in the solar system, only 10 minutes of dawn and twilight time before sunrise and after sunset can be used.

The first author of the report, astronomer Scott Sheppard, said that this time, using the twilight time to detect asteroids in the orbits of Earth and Venus, not only 2022 AP7, a "planet killer" asteroid, was found, "so far. , we discovered 2 large near-Earth asteroids with a diameter of about 1 km, which we call planet killers."

He said, "2022 AP7 (orbit) will stagger with Earth's orbit, making it a potentially dangerous asteroid, but its trajectory does not appear to collide with Earth at any time now or in the future"; however, due to any operational The potential threat of celestial bodies comes from the fact that their trajectories are slowly altered by many gravitational factors, especially planetary gravity, making very long-term predictions difficult.

The U.S. government-funded National Optical Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) noted that the newly discovered near-Earth asteroid "is the largest potentially dangerous object to Earth discovered in the past eight years."

The current orbit of 2022 AP7 will take 5 years to revolve around the sun once, and it will still be millions of kilometers away when it is closest to the earth.

Therefore, the risk of the asteroid hitting Earth is very small, but in the event of a collision, an asteroid of this size "would have had a devastating impact on life on Earth as we know it," Sheppard said, including The dust fills the air and can have a severe cooling effect, triggering an "extinction event not seen on Earth for millions of years."

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'Planet Killer' Covered by the Sun Has the Power to Destroy the Earth