‘City Killer' Asteroid Won't Hit Earth, But What Happens If It Slams Into The Moon?
When it was first discovered, this asteroid had a very small chance of impacting Earth in December of 2032, but later observations concluded the space rock no longer poses any significant risk to our planet.
Since then, additional data has helped experts refine the asteroid's potential trajectory and they say the probability of it striking the moon in 2032 has now risen to 4.3%. That's still a very small chance, but there could be some complications for our planet if that collision happens.
(MORE: Lego Man's Epic Space Journey)
Back To The Beginning
2024 YR4 first caught astronomers' attention in December 2024. It made headlines when its probability of impacting Earth got as high as 3%.
It's so far away that it appears as just a tiny glimmer, but using infrared images captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scientists estimate that it's the size of a 10-story building, about 200 feet in diameter.
It's considered a near-Earth asteroid, meaning it's in an orbit that brings it within Earth's region of the solar system.
Its size earned the asteroid the nickname 'city killer' since it could cause severe damage to a city or region if it struck Earth.
2024 YR4 is the temporary name given to the rock. While those who discovered it will get to suggest an official name, it could be months or years before that official name is decided by the International Astronomical Union.
What Happens If It Strikes The Moon?
If this asteroid hits the moon, scientists say it will make impact at a speed of tens of thousands of miles per hour. That would create a huge crater, but more importantly, it could also send fragments of moon rock and granular lunar material flying off the moon.
While it's unlikely the Earth would face any significant danger from the lunar strike, that debris could put nearby astronauts at risk, as well as satellites that we depend on for GPS, cellphones, internet and weather forecasting.
What about the International Space Station? Well that would be at risk, except that NASA plans to decommission and deorbit the ISS in 2031, a year before the asteroid's potential impact.
(MORE: New Images Show Universe Like Never Before)
Would We Be Able To See The Collision?
The latest calculations from June suggest it's likely the asteroid could hit the near side of the moon, the side pointing towards us.
So we could be able to see the once-in-a-lifetime collision here on Earth. Dr. Paul Wiegert, a physics and astronomy professor at Western University told Western News, 'If YR4 hits the moon, it will be the largest asteroid to have hit the moon in about 5,000 years. It's quite a rare event.'
Wiegert says, 'People at home will be able to see the explosion with small telescopes or even binoculars.'
He also says that if moon rock is launched into space, 'We should also get to see quite a spectacular meteor shower,' within a week of the collision.
So What Now?
Asteroid 2024 YR4 is currently too far away to detect with space or ground-based telescopes, as it orbits around the sun. But out of sight, does not mean out of mind – NASA expects to make more observations and collect new data when the asteroid's orbit brings it back into Earth's vicinity in 2028.
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CNET
36 minutes ago
- CNET
Catch the Perseids Meteor Shower This Week, and See Bright Fireballs in the Skies
Skygazers have had a lot to look at recently. A couple of dueling meteor showers graced the skies earlier this week, but if you missed that then you can still catch perhaps the most popular meteor shower of the year: the Perseids meteor shower. Perseids are known for their bright fireballs and plentiful meteors. The show started on July 17, and will run through Aug. 23. The reason the Perseids meteor shower is so popular is twofold. First, it takes place in the summer, so going outside and watching it is less uncomfortable than other large meteor showers like Quadrantids, which takes place in wintery January. The other reason is that it's one of the most active meteor showers of the year. During its peak, the meteor shower is known to spit as many as 100 meteors on average, according to the American Meteor Society. These not only include your typical shooting stars, but also a higher chance for fireballs, which are meteors that explode as they enter orbit. Per NASA, fireballs tend to last longer than standard shooting stars and can come in a variety of different colors. Perseids come to Earth courtesy of the 109P/Swift-Tuttle comet. Earth's orbit around the sun brings it through Swift-Tuttle's tail every year. The comet itself takes 133 years to orbit the sun. Its last perihelion -- the point at which it's the closest to the sun -- was in 1992. It won't be back until the year 2125. Until then, it leaves behind an excellent tail of dust and debris to feed us yearly meteor showers. How to catch the Perseids meteor shower The best time to view the Perseids is during its peak, which occurs on the evenings of Aug. 12 and 13. During this time, the shower will produce anywhere from 25 to 100 meteors per hour on average. However, since the shower officially lasts for over a month, you have a chance to see a shooting star on any given evening, provided that you're far enough away from light pollution. Thus, if you're planning on watching this year's Perseids during their peak, you'll want to get out of the city and suburbs as far as possible. According to Bill Cooke, lead of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office, folks in the city might see one or two meteors from the meteor shower per hour, which is pocket change compared to what those outside city limits might see. Regardless, once you've arrived at wherever you want to watch the meteors, you'll want to direct your attention to the radiant, or the point at which the meteors will appear to originate. Like all meteors, Perseids are named after the constellation from which they appear. In this case, it's Perseus. Per Stellarium's free sky map, Perseus will rise from the northeastern horizon across the continental US on the evenings of Aug. 12 and 13. It'll then rise into the eastern sky, where it'll remain until after sunrise. So, in short, point yourself due east and you should be OK. Binoculars may help, but we recommend against telescopes since they'll restrict your view of the sky to a very small portion, which may hinder your meteor-sighting efforts. The American Meteor Society also notes that the moon may give viewers some difficulty. Perseids' peak occurs just three days after August's full moon, so the moon will still be mostly full. Thus, it is highly probable that light pollution from the moon may reduce the number of visible meteors by a hefty margin, depending on how things go.
Atlantic
38 minutes ago
- Atlantic
How Scientific Empires End
Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison. The danger had been present from the U.S.S.R.'s founding. The Bolsheviks who took power in 1917 wanted scientists sent to Arctic labor camps. (Vladimir Lenin intervened on their behalf.) When Joseph Stalin took power, he funded some research generously, but insisted that it conform to his ideology. Sagdeev said that his school books described Stalin as the father of all fields of knowledge, and credited the Soviets with every technological invention that had ever been invented. Later, at scientific conferences, Sagdeev heard physicists criticize the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics on the grounds that it conflicted with Marxism. By 1973, when Sagdeev was made director of the Soviet Space Research Institute, the nation's top center for space science, the Soviets had ceded leadership in orbit to NASA. American astronauts had flown around the moon and left a thousand bootprints on its surface. Sagdeev's institute was short on money. Many people who worked there had the right Communist Party connections, but no scientific training. Eventually, he himself had to join the party. 'It was the only way to secure stable funding,' he told me when we spoke in June. In 1985, Sagdeev briefly gained the ear of power. Mikhail Gorbachev had just become general secretary at 54, young for the Soviet gerontocracy. He promised broad reforms and appointed Sagdeev as an adviser. The two traveled to Geneva together for Gorbachev's first arms talks with Ronald Reagan. But Sagdeev's view of Gorbachev began to dim when the premier filled important scientific positions with men whom Sagdeev saw as cronies. In 1988, Sagdeev wrote a letter to Gorbachev to warn him that the leaders of the Soviet supercomputer program had deceived him. They claimed to be keeping pace with the United States, but had in fact fallen far behind, and would soon be surpassed by the Chinese. Gorbachev never replied. Sagdeev got a hint as to how his letter had been received when his invitation to join a state visit to Poland was abruptly withdrawn. 'I was excommunicated,' he told me. Sagdeev took stock of his situation. The future of Soviet science was looking grim. Within a few years, government funding would crater further. Sagdeev's most talented colleagues were starting to slip out of the country. One by one, he watched them start new lives elsewhere. Many of them went to the U.S. At the time, America was the most compelling destination for scientific talent in the world. It would remain so until earlier this year. I thought of Sagdeev on a recent visit to MIT. A scientist there, much celebrated in her field, told me that since Donald Trump's second inauguration she has watched in horror as his administration has performed a controlled demolition on American science. Like many other researchers in the U.S., she's not sure that she wants to stick around to dodge falling debris, and so she is starting to think about taking her lab abroad. (She declined to be named in this story so that she could speak openly about her potential plans.) The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. 'It's very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,' Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University's undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now. Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science—the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others—and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility—or else be subject to correction by political appointees. Not since the Red Scare, when researchers at the University of California had to sign loyalty oaths, and those at the University of Washington and MIT were disciplined or fired for being suspected Communists, has American science been so beholden to political ideology. At least during the McCarthy era, scientists could console themselves that despite this interference, federal spending on science was surging. Today, it's drying up. Three-fourths of American scientists who responded to a recent poll by the journal Nature said they are considering leaving the country. They don't lack for suitors. China is aggressively recruiting them, and the European Union has set aside a €500 million slush fund to do the same. National governments in Norway, Denmark, and France—nice places to live, all—have green-lighted spending sprees on disillusioned American scientists. The Max Planck Society, Germany's elite research organization, recently launched a poaching campaign in the U.S., and last month, France's Aix-Marseille University held a press conference announcing the arrival of eight American ' science refugees.' The MIT scientist who is thinking about leaving the U.S. told me that the Swiss scientific powerhouse ETH Zurich had already reached out about relocating her lab to its picturesque campus with a view of the Alps. A top Canadian university had also been in touch. These institutions are salivating over American talent, and so are others. Not since Sagdeev and other elite Soviet researchers were looking to get out of Moscow has there been a mass-recruiting opportunity like this. Every scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons. In ancient Sumer, a proto-scientific civilization bloomed in the great cities of Ur and Uruk. Sumerians invented wheels that carried the king's war chariots swiftly across the Mesopotamian plains. Their priest astronomers stood atop ziggurats watching the sky. But the Sumerians appear to have over-irrigated their farmland—a technical misstep, perhaps—and afterwards, their weakened cities were invaded, and the kingdom broke apart. They could no longer operate at the scientific vanguard. Science in ancient Egypt and Greece followed a similar pattern: It thrived during good times and fell off in periods of plague, chaos, and impoverishment. But not every case of scientific decline has played out this way. Some civilizations have willfully squandered their scientific advantage. Spanish science, for example, suffered grievously during the Inquisition. Scientists feared for their lives. They retreated from pursuits and associations that had a secular tinge and thought twice before corresponding with suspected heretics. The exchange of ideas slowed in Spain, and its research excellence declined relative to the rest of Europe. In the 17th century, the Spanish made almost no contribution to the ongoing Scientific Revolution. The Soviets sabotaged their own success in biomedicine. In the 1920s, the U.S.S.R. had one of the most advanced genetics programs in the world, but that was before Stalin empowered Trofim Lysenko, a political appointee who didn't believe in Mendelian inheritance. Lysenko would eventually purge thousands of apostate biologists from their jobs, and ban the study of genetics outright. Some of the scientists were tossed into the Gulag; others starved or faced firing squads. As a consequence of all this, the Soviets played no role in the discovery of DNA's double-helix structure. When the ban on 'anti-Marxist' genetics was finally lifted, Gordin told me, the U.S.S.R. was a generation behind in molecular biology and couldn't catch up. But it was Adolf Hitler who possessed the greatest talent for scientific self-harm. Germany had been a great scientific power going back to the late 19th century. Germans had pioneered the modern research university by requiring that professors not only transmit knowledge but advance it, too. During the early 20th century, German scientists racked up Nobel Prizes. Physicists from greater Europe and the U.S. converged on Berlin, Göttingen, and Munich to hear about the strange new quantum universe from Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein. When the Nazis took over in 1933, Hitler purged Germany's universities of Jewish professors and others who opposed his rule. Many scientists were murdered. Others fled the country. Quite a few settled in America. That's how Einstein got to Princeton. After Hans Bethe was dismissed from his professorship in Tübingen, he landed at Cornell. Then he went to MIT to work on the radar technology that would reveal German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. Some historians have argued that radar was more important to Allied victory than the Manhattan Project. But of course, that, too, was staffed with European scientific refugees, including Leo Szilard, a Jewish physicist who fled Berlin the year that Hitler took power; Edward Teller, who went on to build the first hydrogen bomb; and John von Neumann, who invented the architecture of the modern computer. In a very short time, the center of gravity for science just up and moved across the Atlantic Ocean. After the war, it was American scientists who most regularly journeyed to Stockholm to receive medals. It was American scientists who built on von Neumann's work to take an early lead in the Information Age that the U.S. has still not relinquished. And it was American scientists who developed the vaccines for polio and measles. During the postwar period, Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development under FDR, sought to make America's advantage in the sciences permanent. Bush hadn't liked the way that the U.S. had to scramble to staff up the radar and atomic-bomb projects. He wanted a robust supply of scientists on hand at American universities in case the Cold War turned hot. He argued for the creation of the National Science Foundation to fund basic research, and promised that its efforts would improve both the economy and national defense. Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America's research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump's interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: 'This is an unparalleled destruction from within.' I reached out to the office of Michael Kratsios, the president's science and technology adviser, several times while reporting this story. I asked whether Kratsios, who holds the role that once belonged to Vannevar Bush, had any response to the claim that the Trump administration's attack on science was unprecedented. I asked about the possibility that its policies will drive away American researchers, and will deter foreigners from working in American labs. I was hoping to find out how the man responsible for maintaining U.S. scientific dominance was engaging with this apparent slide into mediocrity. I did not receive a reply. All is not yet lost for American science. Lawmakers have already made clear that they do not intend to approve Trump's full requested cuts at the NIH, NSF, and NASA. Those agencies will still have access to tens of billions of dollars in federal funds next year—and blue-state attorneys general have won back some of this year's canceled grants in court. Research institutions still have some fight left in them; some are suing the administration for executive overreach. Universities in red states are hoping that their governors will soon summon the courage to take a stand on their behalf. 'Politically speaking, it's one thing to shut down research at Harvard,' Steven Shapin, a science historian at the school, told me. 'It's another thing to shut down the University of Arkansas.' The U.S. government doesn't bankroll all of American scientific research. Philanthropists and private companies support some of it, and will continue to. The U.S. shouldn't face the kind of rapid collapse that occurred in the Soviet Union, where no robust private sector existed to absorb scientists. But even corporations with large R&D budgets don't typically fund open-ended inquiry into fundamental scientific questions. With the possible exception of Bell Labs in its heyday, they focus on projects that have immediate commercial promise. Their shareholders would riot if they dumped $10 billion into a space telescope or particle collider that takes decades to build and generates little revenue. A privatized system of American science will be distorted toward short-term work, and people who want to run longer-term experiments with more expensive facilities will go elsewhere. 'American science could lose a whole generation,' Shapin said. 'Young people are already starting to get the message that science isn't as valued as it once was.' If the U.S. is no longer the world's technoscientific superpower, it will almost certainly suffer for the change. America's technology sector might lose its creativity. But science itself, in the global sense, will be fine. The deep human curiosities that drive it do not belong to any nation-state. An American abdication will only hurt America, Shapin said. Science might further decentralize into a multipolar order like the one that held during the 19th century, when the British, French, and Germans vied for technical supremacy. Read: 'This is not how we do science, ever' Or maybe, by the midway point of the 21st century, China will be the world's dominant scientific power, as it was, arguably, a millennium ago. The Chinese have recovered from Mao Zedong's own squandering of expertise during the Cultural Revolution. They have rebuilt their research institutions, and Xi Jinping's government keeps them well funded. China's universities now rank among the world's best, and their scientists routinely publish in Science, Nature, and other top journals. Elite researchers who were born in China and then spent years or even decades in U.S. labs have started to return. What the country can't yet do well is recruit elite foreign scientists, who by dint of their vocation tend to value freedom of speech. Whatever happens next, existing knowledge is unlikely to be lost, at least not en masse. Humans are better at preserving it now, even amid the rise and fall of civilizations. Things used to be more touch-and-go: The Greek model of the cosmos might have been forgotten, and the Copernican revolution greatly delayed, had Islamic scribes not secured it in Baghdad's House of Wisdom. But books and journals are now stored in a network of libraries and data centers that stretches across all seven continents, and machine translation has made them understandable by any scientist, anywhere. Nature's secrets will continue to be uncovered, even if Americans aren't the ones who see them first. In 1990, Roald Sagdeev moved to America. He found leaving the Soviet Union difficult. His two brothers lived not far from his house in Moscow, and when he said goodbye to them, he worried that it would be for the last time. Sagdeev thought about going to Europe, but the U.S. seemed more promising. He'd met many Americans on diplomatic visits there, including his future wife. He'd befriended others while helping to run the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz missions. When Carl Sagan visited the Soviet Space Research Institute in Moscow, Sagdeev had shown him around, and the two remained close. To avoid arousing the suspicions of the Soviet authorities, Sagdeev flew to Hungary first, and only once he was safely there did he book a ticket to the U.S. He accepted a professorship at the University of Maryland and settled in Washington, D.C. It took him years to ride out the culture shock. He still remembers being pulled over for a traffic infraction, and mistakenly presenting his Soviet ID card. American science is what ultimately won Sagdeev over to his new home. He was awestruck by the ambition of the U.S. research agenda, and he liked that it was backed by real money. He appreciated that scientists could move freely between institutions, and didn't have to grovel before party leaders to get funding. But when I last spoke with Sagdeev, on July 4, he was feeling melancholy about the state of American science. Once again, he is watching a great scientific power in decline. He has read about the proposed funding cuts in the newspaper. He has heard about a group of researchers who are planning to leave the country. Sagdeev is 92 years old, and has no plans to join them. But as an American, it pains him to see them go.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Violent subglacial flood fractured Greenland's ice in never-before-seen event
A massive subglacial flood punched its way through the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2014, but it's only now that scientists have pieced together how and why. New research reveals that a previously undetected lake beneath the ice drained with such explosive force that it fractured the thick ice above and burst out across the surface. This is the first time scientists have observed such an upward-moving flood in Greenland, and it's challenging long-held assumptions about how meltwater behaves beneath ice sheets. Ice shredded, not melted The event unfolded over ten days in a remote region of northern Greenland. Using satellite data from NASA and the European Space Agency, along with high-resolution surface maps from the ArcticDEM project, researchers tracked the dramatic drainage of a hidden subglacial lake. About 90 million cubic meters of water, roughly the volume of nine hours of peak Niagara Falls flow, escaped from beneath the ice, carving an 85-metre-deep crater across two square kilometers of ice surface. It stands among the largest subglacial floods ever recorded in Greenland. But what stunned the scientists even more was what they found downstream. In an area that had previously shown no signs of instability, they discovered a newly fractured ice landscape. Over 385,000 square meters, about the size of 54 football fields, was covered in deep crevasses and towering, 25-meter-high upturned ice blocks. Surrounding this zone was another six square kilometers of scoured terrain, nearly twice the size of New York's Central Park. The scale and violence of the flood left researchers with little doubt about the power of water moving beneath the ice. Lead author Dr Jade Bowling, who conducted the work during her PhD at Lancaster University, said the findings were initially hard to believe. 'When we first saw this, we thought there must be a problem with the data,' she said. 'But the more we looked, the clearer it became that we were seeing the aftermath of an enormous flood that forced its way up through the ice.' Models missed the rupture Until now, most models of Greenland's ice sheet assumed that meltwater moves from the surface down through the ice, eventually draining into the ocean. This study shows that, under extreme pressure, subglacial water can move in the opposite direction, fracturing the ice from below and exploding upward. Because most models don't include these mechanisms, they may be underestimating the ice sheet's vulnerability. Even more surprisingly, the flood occurred in a region where the bed of the ice sheet was thought to be frozen solid. That led researchers to propose a new mechanism: extreme water pressure caused fracturing along the ice base, which in turn allowed the water to erupt through the ice and escape at the surface. 'The Greenland Ice Sheet contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by more than seven meters,' Bowling said. 'Understanding how subglacial water moves and disrupts the ice is critical for predicting its future behavior.' 'This flood shows us that the ice sheet can respond in ways we didn't expect,' said co-author Dr Amber Leeson, a glaciologist at Lancaster University. 'It's a wake-up call to dig deeper into the processes we still don't fully understand.' Professor Mal McMillan, co-director of the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, emphasized the importance of satellite data in detecting such hidden events. 'This kind of event would have gone unnoticed without long-term satellite data,' he said. 'It shows how critical these observations are for tracking climate change in real time.' Because most ice sheet models assume meltwater travels only downward or laterally to the ocean, they overlook the possibility of upward-directed floods like this one. That blind spot could impact projections of how quickly the Greenland Ice Sheet is destabilizing in a warming world. As climate change continues to intensify surface melting and expand it into new areas, such extreme water surges may become more frequent. To keep pace, scientists say models must evolve to reflect the full complexity of subglacial hydrology. Continued monitoring from missions like ESA's CryoSat and NASA's ICESat-2 will be vital for detecting hidden lakes and tracking how they behave. The study was a massive international effort, involving researchers from over a dozen institutions, including Lancaster University, Northumbria University, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, the University of California, the Alfred Wegener Institute, DTU Space, and the University of Leeds. The findings have been published today in Nature Geoscience.
