I can be patient
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Astronomers Have Mapped The Paths of Hazardous Asteroids For The Next 1,000 Years
They are creating maps and catalogs of all potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, or NEOs. Obviously the larger rocks pose a bigger threat, but thankfully they are less numerous. And while our census of hazardous NEOs is not nearly complete, we do have reliable maps of nearly all of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than a kilometer (0.6 mile) across.
This is useful, to say the least, because kilometer-scale asteroids have the potential to not only wipe out entire cities, but could cause significant ecological harm across the globe.
To estimate the risk that these large NEOs pose, a team of astronomers have predicted their orbits over the next thousand years. Their analysis suggests that none of these kilometer-scale NEOs pose a significant risk to us over the next century.
However, we have difficulty predicting the orbits of these NEOs past that. This is because in orbital dynamics small changes can lead to big effects over enormous timescales. A slight difference in the amount of heating that an asteroid receives from the Sun, or an unexpected tug from Jupiter, could send an asteroid on a trajectory that in a few thousand years ends up intersecting the Earth.
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The astronomers identified one particular NEO, Asteroid 7482, as especially hazardous. This asteroid will spend a significant amount of time near the Earth for the next millennium. While that doesn't necessarily mean that it will strike our planet, it does mean that this rock poses the greatest chance of a collision within the next thousand years.
The researchers also highlighted another asteroid, Asteroid 143651, that has such a chaotic orbit that it's impossible to predict its exact position past a few decades. Thus while it might or might not pose a threat at all, based on our current understanding of its position and its velocity we cannot say for certain.
Altogether the astronomers identified 28 candidates that have a non-zero probability of a "deep encounter," which means they will pass within less than the distance to the Moon.
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It's only twenty four hours from Tulsa.
