This time last year, the world was shocked by reports that an incoming, approximately 200 feet wide asteroid had a very slim chance of hitting Earth in 2032. The matter of relief is that we were not in its path. don’t look up The scenario was clear when, upon closer inspection, astronomers determined that the space rock, named 2024 YR4, will not hit our planet.
Instead, he calculated that It is possible Will hit the Moon in 2032—with a probability of about 4 percent. And now scientists are building a clearer picture of what such a collision with Earth might look like.
In a recent study Posted On the preprint server arXiv.org and has yet to be peer-reviewed, astronomers found that if the asteroid hits the moon, it will leave an “optical flash” that will be visible from Earth, and hours of “infrared glow” will follow. “This would be the most energetic lunar impact event ever recorded in human history,” they wrote.
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Scientists already knew this could be a doozy. Astronomers previously estimated that if 2024 YR4 hits the moon, it could create a crater nearly a kilometer wide and release about 100 million metric tons of material, some of which could reach Earth.
There is no guarantee that such a collision will happen, but if it does happen then it will be historic.
“If this scenario plays out,” said Yixuan Wu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China and author of the paper. for living science“This will be a milestone for planetary science, turning the Earth-Moon system into a grand platform for validating our understanding of asteroid impacts.”
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