recently The asteroid 2024 yr4Which is expected to pass the Earth in 2032, was calculated to have a chance of 1 out of 83 to strike our planet. Then a week and suddenly there was a new title: It is now believed that the 2024 YR4 asteroid has only one chance of 43 years to strike our planet – the highest possibility of registration ever on space rock to hit our planet. Later the space rock wobbling Again, this time to a metaphorical astronomer and literally 1 in 59,000 chances of influence.
In short, the asteroid 2024 YR4 moved from breaking the records of the known threat to asteroids to being a semi -zero threat. At some point in the near future, this danger may be old.
the Rock It is 130 – 300 feet across (40 – 90 meters), and this means in the event of such a collision, at least it will lead to shattered windows, breaking the infrastructure if it occurs near a large city. The effect will be less harmful if this happens above the ocean, as the 2024 YR4 asteroid is not enough enough even in the external range of projections to create a tsunami.
However, most people want an absolute zero instead of almost zero possibility in their disaster expectations. Reality does not instill the same confidence that one sees in depicting the science fiction of the scenarios in which the objects of the semi -Earth such as asteroids and comets are approaching our planet. in “Deep effect” and “Harmjdoun,” The astronauts are known for sure that our planet is in danger, and how long they have to solve the problem and how to use nuclear weapons to detonate those things close to the dangerous earth before they wipe all life as we know it.
“The most important thing about things close to the ground is to find them early.”
However, according to Richard B. Benzel, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who invented the risk of influencing Turin to measure these space rocks, we should not think in terms of decisive possibilities and solutions in this issue.
Binzel literally created regime scientists and ordinary people alike to assess the threats that things close to the Earth on a scale (no threat) to 10 (will definitely strike the Earth and destroy life.) Because the sky is very wide and our knowledge of it is so limited that the scale is unable to do anything more than work in the possibilities. In this way, the Turin scale allows us to know frankly what we deal with, at the sporting level, where we realize the increasing number of variables related to the asteroid or guilty given.
We will need any information we can get. If our gender in our lives is so lucky that it has not already faced a semi -terrible object, Binzel notes that the elegant solutions that were filmed in the cinema are not far from what we would have already obtained at our disposal.
This interview was released for clarity and length.
How did you develop the Turin scale?
Once, if you go back to the beginning, it will be the Eugene Shoemaker, who was studying the pits. He would have been a pioneer of Apollo’s space, but he was washed [Shoemarker developed Addison’s disease, an endocrine disorder]So he studied drilling. It is a geological world that decided that a meteorite hole in Arizona was a hole by finding minerals below the lower part of the hole that could only be formed through a high -heat shock wave, which is an effect hole. Thus, the shoe maker began to want to know what was making drilling on the ground, on the surface of the moon. He turned himself from a geological world to an astronomer and began to search for these things in the seventies.
I actually worked as a summer shoe maker in 1980. I started focusing, or at least knowledgeable, working in the field of things near Earth since 1980. While we were discovering these things and surveys that the shoe maker was doing, and then others came, we will reach the point where we discovered an object that had an unilateral possibility of the individual on the ground. It can be one out of every 20,000, one out of every 60,000, just a really small number, but not zero. Thus astronomers were confused: What do we do with this? Do we keep the confidentiality of these things until we get enough data and we can make them disappear, then we do not have to disturb anyone?
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The problem is two parts. One of them, data, and notes are always general, and therefore anyone who cannot read the list of asteroids notes can do these types of orbit solutions themselves and announces this to the public. Second, the sky is free and open to all, so it does not seem right not to tell you to be publicly what you find in the sky. While we were reaching the point of finding things that could pose a threat to the Earth, or at least we could not exclude some small opportunities to hit the Earth in a far date, we had no way to communicate. It will be a little of the Babylon Tower, with different astronomers say different things.
It is not that the numbers were different, but they express themselves in different ways, and this may be very confusing to the public. This was the motivation to find a common communication system, a common scale that we can put in the context of any newly discovered being. Thus this is now back to 1995 when a man named John L. gathered. Remo is a conference at the United Nations to discuss the discovery and calculation of asteroid orbits near Earth. This is where the first concept of the common language or the common range was presented. I called it the danger indicator. This first offer in 1995 was zero to five, and it led to a lot of discussion, but not much enthusiasm.
Therefore, I suggested forward, and took a lot of inputs from my colleagues, from science journalists, in terms of what we could do would make the communication system better. From that, I reviewed the proposal to a scale of 10 points, I added some wide descriptions of the different groups of what deserves attention by astronomers, what would be a real threat, then what will be classified by a specific collision.
This is the minimum classification of objects on the Turin scale. So a small being discovered that he would disintegrate the atmosphere, or may decline a few pieces on the ground, is zero on the Turin scale, even if we are sure that it would strike.
Where is the minimum? Then on what possibility becomes an interesting thing? For example, on average in any specific year, the size of 2024 YR4 may have one chance in every thousand chances to hit the Earth or be surprised. This is the level in which you will be on the Turin’s scale: if we discover an object and have a higher possibility than just a type of medium background in any specific year. Anything less than four [on the scale]I will not worry.
What do you think of the various scientific theories about how we can deviate or protect ourselves from the things close to the earth? Which of you think is viable and which you think is more fictional?
The most important thing about things close to the ground is to find it early. The more early you have, or more than or more decades, you have to find an object, the more options you have like deviation, which is the easiest. The more years you possess, the more years you need to make sure that things will lose the ground. Currently, this is the ability that we have, or the ability we tested is a deviation technique, to push an asteroid a little outside the path. For this reason, these new surveys are already important because we start completing the stock of what exists, and the more time we will get, if there are some things with our name.
Do you think that, regardless of the things close to the land that made the news, there are other bodies there that we should be concerned?
There are thousands and thousands of things like 2024 yr4 and the smallest there. We simply need to do a comprehensive work in their indexing as a first step towards making sure that we have never taken it, with anything big.
