What are the chances of Earth being hit by a big asteroid?
CBC
A week ago, the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images. It also included a video of all the asteroids it discovered. In just 10 hours, the Simonyi Survey Telescope with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera captured more than 2,000 previously undetected asteroids.
It's a reminder that, while there's a lot of space in space, our solar system still has a lot going on.
Asteroids are rocks and debris left over from the formation of our solar system. There are two main areas where much of it is located. The first being the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The second is the Kuiper Belt, beyond the orbit of Neptune.
But there are still many more floating around out there.
Scientists estimate that roughly 44 tonnes of meteoric debris fall toward Earth every day. That's right: every day.
The good news is that most of it burns up in our atmosphere.
But what are the chances that a much larger object is on a collision course with Earth?
"Earth has been hit in the past by large asteroids, and presumably, if we waited long enough, something would happen. But the risk is very, very small," said Paul Weigert, a professor at Western University's department of physics and astronomy in London, Ont.
"So none of the asteroids that we know about today have a significant chance of striking Earth in the next 100 years or so. So that's a pretty healthy time horizon."
However, there's no guarantee that something that has thus far been undetected isn't on its way.
"As we go beyond that, there's always the chance that we can discover new asteroids, of course, and they become not unpredictable, but harder to predict in great detail, at longer distances," Weigert added.
There are numerous groups scanning the sky looking for asteroids, and Weigert said that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory ramps up the search like never before.
"The Vera Rubin telescope is really going to revolutionize the way this kind of work is done. I think even people who knew what to expect, that knew this was coming down the pipeline, were impressed by the way LSST-Rubin was able really dive right in and start finding these things," he said. "So that's going to be a very impressive discovery machine going forward."
NASA has found more than 1.4 billion asteroids, and believes it has identified more than 95 per cent of asteroids one kilometre or larger in our solar system.
