In July 2019, the asteroid 2019 OK got here screaming out of the glare of the Sun the place astronomers discover it tough to detect such small, faint objects, and handed inside 45,000 miles of Earth whereas touring at 5,487 miles per hour. That’s nicely contained in the Moon’s common orbit of round 238,000 miles.
Despite the shut name, 2019 OK didn’t pose a menace to life on Earth, however asteroids prefer it someday may. That’s why scientists on the Arecibo radio astronomy observatory in Puerto Rico raced to make as many radar observations of the area rock as they might within the half hour or so it could stay in vary of their antennas. They wished to be taught as a lot as doable about an asteroid that handed the Earth that intently and rapidly.
“It was a real challenge,” Luisa Fernanda Zambrano-Marin, a University of Central Florida planetary scientist who was at Arecibo in 2019, mentioned in a press release. “No one saw it until it was practically passing by, so when we got the alert, we had very little time to act. Even so, we were able to capture a lot of valuable information.”
That info is now revealed in a brand new paper within the Planetary Science Journal.
Among Ms Zambrano-Marin and her colleague’s findings is that 2019 OK is a quickly spinning asteroid, which suggests it’s not a “rubble pile” asteroid, however possesses sufficient inner cohesion to maintain from spinning itself aside. They estimate its diameter to be at most, round 450 toes.
They additionally imagine the asteroid is both a C or S sort asteroid, the primary and second most typical sort of asteroid within the Solar System. C-type asteroids include silicate rocks and clay, whereas S-types include nickel-iron and silicate rocks.
But crucial takeaway from the not too long ago revealed findings is that no matter its make up, 2019 OK received’t pose a menace to Earth, at the very least not any time quickly. Based on the Arecibo observations, 2019 OK will solely come near Earth as soon as extra between now and the yr 2116, and that will likely be on 28 July, 2093, when it passes inside greater than 4 million miles of our planet.
Still, the observations of 2019 OK stay good follow for astronomers centered on monitoring the greater than 30,000 identified near-Earth asteroids that might doubtlessly pose a menace to Earth, and for responding to sneaky, emergent area rocks like 2019. Astronomers at Arecibo are internet hosting panel discussions forward of the worldwide Asteroid Awareness Day on Thursday, a marketing campaign to lift public notion of the potential menace of errant area rocks and scientists’ efforts to raised perceive them.
Source: www.unbiased.co.uk