- The first of them, called AH, measures 107 meters in diameter and will pass about 4.55 million kilometers away from Earth, according to NASA.
- The second, called AE3, is 149 meters long (about the size of Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest of the seven wonders of the ancient world) and will approach 4.54 million kilometers from us. It will be the last outstanding asteroid to “close” to our planet before the end of the year.
- The third, which will arrive on Three Kings’ Day, is YE15, 7 meters long (approximately the size of a bus), and which will pass about 7.4 million kilometers away from Earth.
Do they represent a threat?
None of them represent a threat to us, since according to NASA, not even YE15, the largest of them, has been classified as “potentially dangerous”. For this to be the case, the asteroid must measure more than 150 meters in length and approach less than 7.5 million kilometers away from Earth.
If an asteroid were to hit Earth in the future, one more than a kilometer in diameter could trigger a large number of cataclysms around the world.
According to research by the Davidson Institute of Science, the educational arm of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science , an asteroid larger than 140 meters, such as AE3, would release an amount of energy at least a thousand times greater than the energy released by the first atomic bomb. if it hit the Earth. If it were even bigger, like (99942) Apophis which is over 300 meters wide like the asteroid Apophis, it could destroy an entire continent. This asteroid Aton is the object that has the most probabilities of impact, although they are quite distant.
When was the last time a large asteroid hit Earth?
Although each year the Earth is hit by approximately 16 tons of meteorites that precipitate in the atmosphere, the last impact of an asteroid of considerable size was in 1908 on the Podkamennaya Tunguska river in Russia, in what is now known as the event of Tunguska. When the asteroid (Tunguska bolide) exploded in the air several kilometers above the area , it produced a massive 12-megaton explosion, causing widespread destruction over thousands of kilometers. Its force was similar to that of 300 atomic bombs.
Due to how remote and sparsely populated the region was, since it was the central Siberian plateau, a fairly inhospitable area, there was a very low number of deaths (just three people). However, the surroundings did give a good account of the event: 80 million trees destroyed, with winds of around 27 kilometers, with tremors and radio waves so strong that they were felt as far away as Washington (United States) and Indonesia. It was one of the largest explosions ever recorded in history (still not comparable to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago, of course).
Reference: NASA
