'Dead angle' causes asteroid to come very close to Earth without being detected

NASA's recent grim warning shows that Earth is facing potential dangers when asteroids "sneak" through radar systems undetected. 

Recently, NASA-funded scientists have discovered that the Earth's orbit around the Sun has many "dead angles", allowing a number of outer space objects to rush towards them. Earth, especially at night, may be beyond the reach of computerized telescopes.

Asteroids may come from a "dead angle", making it difficult for scientists to observe their movements.

Research published in the journal Icarus says that 50% of impactors that come close to Earth at a certain angle will experience a period of irregular motion, making them difficult to detect.

Specifically, that's when asteroids hit Earth from one area of ​​the sky toward the East, at around 2am. Now, the way the Earth rotates and its orbit can make flying objects look like they are moving very slowly, even "as if at rest", but that is not the case. "Observers should be extra careful when observing the sky in this direction, and actively watch for newly emerging slow-moving objects," the team wrote.

The famous Barringer crater with a diameter of 1.2km in the northern Arizona desert (USA) is an eloquent proof of the wounds on Earth caused by meteorites.

In 2019, there was an asteroid with a diameter of 100 meters that passed by Earth at a distance of only 69,000 km. The danger is that we only discovered it 24 hours ago. Immediately after the howling, the US Congress tasked NASA with accurately determining the position and orbit of 90% of asteroids larger than 140 meters in size, because they can destroy an entire city. big city if it crashes into the Earth.

According to Professor Richard Wainscoat, who leads the research team at the University of Hawaii, currently about 40% of large asteroids approaching Earth have been cataloged. As of April 17, 2021, the world recorded There are 25,647 objects of asteroids and comets approaching Earth. In which, 2020 sets a record number of 2,959 objects discovered.

However, in 2020 alone, the worldwide network of astronomical observatories located in more than 40 countries has collected nearly 39.5 million records of observations of similar objects - more significantly compared to the statistics.

Many scientists believe that the cause of the disappearance of dinosaurs was a large meteorite that fell to Earth 64 million years ago, crashing into Central America. By far, the most reliable theory of this collision they produced a layer of dust that blocked sunlight for many years, thereby killing most of the plants - which were the food of the dinosaurs, make them extinct.

Fortunately, the universe is very large, so the chance of Earth being hit by an asteroid is very small, maybe only once every few thousand years, and we shouldn't be too worried about this.