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Journalism of Courage
A swarm of giant “city killer” asteroids hiding near Venus could someday pose a threat to Earth. Also known as co-orbital asteroids, these space rocks are difficult to track since they often travel near planets without orbiting them and have no fixed trajectory.
According to a new study by astronomers at the Sao Paulo State University, Venus currently has 20 known giant asteroids around it. These include ‘trojan’ asteroids, which are either fixed in front or back of a planet’s orbital plane and a quasi-moon named Zoozve.
All of these 20 killer asteroids are said to have originated from our Solar System’s asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter are likely bigger than 140 metres in size, meaning they could potentially devastate a city if they hit Earth. While these space rocks don’t pose any threat from where they are right now, since they don’t have a fixed orbital path, the Earth’s gravitational pull could put them on a collision course with the planet.
What makes the threat real is that Venus, the planet closest to Earth, is just 25 million miles or 40 million kilometres away. The research paper, published on arXiv, simulated the behaviour of these city-killer asteroids with less elongated objects over 36,000 years. The result hinted that some of these could eventually come near Earth and may be pulled by our planet’s gravitational pull, but the chances of this happening are pretty unlikely.
Most known asteroids near Venus have an eccentric orbit, which makes them easy to see during short observation windows. However, the study hints that there may be several more objects with lower orbital eccentricities that are hidden by the Sun’s glare.
As it turns out, we may not be able to spot these hidden space rocks until they approach Earth. The astronomers who published the study said that “this is most likely caused by observational biases since asteroids with larger eccentricities may approach the Earth and are easier to detect.”
But since the exact number of these hidden objects is still unknown, it is pretty hard to say what risk they pose to Earth. “I believe that we should not underestimate their potential danger, but I would not lose sleep over this issue,” said Valerio Carruba, the lead author of the study.
