Coming soon – giant asteroid ‘hiding in the sun’ dazzles astronomers

Starry-eyed optimists – or astronomers as they are sometimes known – have found a giant asteroid, lurking near the sun. They hadn’t noticed it before, because the sun was in their eyes.

It’s the biggest potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA), – known to some sensationalists as “planet killers” – found in eight years, and has been discovered lurking in the sun’s glare.

Finding these uncharted space rocks relies on detecting the sunlight glinting off their surfaces. But in some parts of the sky, the sun’s glare smothers the glare, like fairy lights in front of a nuclear holocaust.

The rock is in the top 5% of the largest-known PHAs.

Cristina Thomas, a planetary astronomer at Northern Arizona University said…

“The interesting thing about the 2022 AP7 is its relatively large size. Its existence suggests that other elephantine asteroids, veiled by the sun’s glare, remain disturbingly undiscovered.”

Called 2022 AP7, it’s one of several newly discovered asteroids found orbiting near Earth and Venus. The asteroid crosses the Earth’s orbit, but there’s no need to panic for now, and panic in the future will be just as much of a waste of time as panic always is, and always has been.

Any possible collision with a giant asteroid probably wouldn’t happen for a few thousand years say the optimists. There is zero chance that there will be humans around to be killed by then, but a new source of irrelevant worry to distract from our real worries – biblical floods, lithium mines, starvation – is always welcome.

The asteroid was detected by the Cerro Tololo observatory in Chile and is detailed in a study in the Astronomical Journal.

The rock in question, 2022 AP7, is roughly 1.6 kilometres long, and its orbit crosses Earth’s path around the sun, getting as near as 7 million kilometres from Earth itself — uncomfortably close by cosmic standards (although far more distant than the moon).

Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and an author of the study, said…

“That makes 2022 AP7 the largest potentially hazardous asteroid found in the last eight years or so. Over time, this asteroid will get brighter and brighter in the sky as it starts crossing Earth’s orbit closer and closer to where the Earth is.

“It’s possible that way down the line, in the next few thousand years, it could turn into a problem for our descendants.”

Or at least those descendants that haven’t been killed in the coming self-inflicted tribulations.