Will asteroid Apophis hit Earth in 2036 and cause the apocalypse? The truth behind rumors.It’s been claimed that an asteroid the size of two and a half football fields will plow into Earth in just under 20 years and wipe out humanity.
This claim was supposedly backed up by this Nasa press release, which detailed scientists work to refine predictions about whether Apophis will hit us.
Apophis has been one of those celestial bodies that have captured the public’s interest since it was discovered in 2004.
Based upon the observed brightness, Apophis’s diameter was initially estimated at 450 meters (1,480 ft); a more refined estimate based on spectroscopic observations at NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii by Binzel, Rivkin, Bus, and Tokunaga (2005) is 350 meters (1,150 ft). NASA’s impact risk page lists the diameter at 330 meters (1,080 ft) and lists a mass of 4×1010 kg based on an assumed density of 2.6 g/cm3. The mass estimate is more approximate than the diameter estimate but should be accurate to within a factor of three. During the 2029 approach, Apophis’s brightness will peak at magnitude 3.4.
Updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million.
Astronomers first said there was a 2.7 percent chance of Apophis hitting Earth in 2029, but this possibility was totally ruled out after further analysis. Scientists subsequently dropped their prediction about the likelihood of it hitting in 2036 and calculated that there’s a three-in-a-million chance of impact in 2068.
If Apophis hit earth, would destroy an area of about 50 square miles and leave behind a crater about three miles wide. Computer simulations suggest that the impact would kill upwards of 10 million people in Columbia and Venezuela and that a strike in the Pacific Ocean would wipe out every coastal city and town along the west coast of the United States killing about 7–9 million people.
Post Your Comments