on today's episode Armageddon has arrived or hasn't there is a newly discovered object in the sky that has some very real potential to create a significant impact on the Earth in our near future according to what we know right now this asteroid could hit us and that's a scary thought but instead of panicking we're going to choose to get informed and we're going to learn as much as we can about this potential City killer of a space Rock and speaking of panic NASA has just increased the probability of impact to 3.1% that's 1 in 32
odds which means that the Earth has a better chance of being hit by an asteroid than winning a game of roulette but before you start digging a bunker in your backyard I'm going to tell you why this is not the end of the world now the asteroid in quest is named 2024 yr4 which basically just tells us that it was discovered at the very end of the year 2024 the first known sighting was Christmas Day spotted at an observatory in Chile the asteroid was seen coming from the direction of the Sun flying past the Earth
on a path towards Mars so after less than 2 months of tracking we've managed to deduce that yr4 moves on an elliptical path that takes it out almost as far as Jupiter and then back in to cross the orbit of Earth this happens once every 4 years so the rock is moving fast it travels at around 13 km/ second currently yr4 is moving away from the earth so it's getting dimmer in the sky and therefore more difficult to observe by April it's going to disappear from the view of our optical telescopes so scientists are getting
in as many observations as they can right now they're even pulling out a secret weapon to track the asteroid into the future and this is the most important thing in order to accurately predict the path of an object we need to observe it over a long period of time right now we're doing a lot of observations in a short time which has not told us very much we are assuming that yr4 is between 40 and 90 m in diameter that's between 130 and 300 ft it could have a mass anywhere between 25,000 tons and 1
million tons we can say that it is not an mclass metallic asteroid or a carbonaceous rock so it's an S-Class Stony asteroid we also know that yr4 is rotating and it's spinning pretty fast which means that this is not a rubble pile this is a solid chunk of Space Rock based on that data we can say that an impact from yr4 on the Earth would be equivalent to one of the most destructive nuclear weapons ever made 500 times the power of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima this will level a city and destroy everything
within a th000 km radius but it will not create a global disaster this is important for everyone to know the impact will be severe but it will not be an extinction level event not even close if such an impact were to happen scientists have already been able to plot a line across the planet showing where that might occur the risk Corridor extends from South Asia through the middle of Africa and ends at the top of South America so the good news is that most of this area is Ocean and the majority of the land that
it covers is the Central African plains which are mostly empty the bad news is that there are several major cities on the path as well Bogota Colombia Abid Jan Ivory Coast AOS Nigeria carum Sudan Mumbai India kolata India and DCA Bangladesh some of the most densely populated cities in the world with a combined total of more than 100 million people living in these Urban centers alone should the people of logos be panicking right now well we need to consider that the current likelihood of yr4 striking the Earth is sitting at 3.1% about 1 in32 odds
and it's project expected that the impact will happen on December 22nd 2032 depending on how you look at it those odds are not exactly bad but they're not reassuring either and the likelihood of impact is increasing just last month we were looking at closer to a 1% chance of impact one in a 100 then last week that doubled yesterday it tripled and it could double again in a very short time we should talk about how these predictions are made we've only been observing this asteroid for about 2 months so we're making predictions based on where
it is right now compared to where it was when it was first spotted and then we try to figure out where it's going and that's why we absolutely need long-term observation in order to make an accurate prediction so what astronomers are doing right now is painting an orbit for yr4 with a very wide brush and somewhere inside that broad brush stroke the actual path of the asteroid is just a very fine little line we know that it's going to be somewhere in this General path and then as we get more dat over time we can
start to narrow down the width of that brush so when we first painted the orbit of yr4 in January the Earth was only taking up about 1% of the potential area and now the Earth is still on that line and it's taking up a little more than 2% every time we narrow the brush if the Earth is still inside the path then the odds of impact will rise so be prepared for that to happen it is likely to happen but do not panic because the next time they narrow the brush the Earth might find itself
outside of the line which means that our likelihood of impact will quickly drop back down to zero it's going to be very confusing for people who don't understand how this works it's probably going to be labeled as a conspiracy or fear-mongering but it's not that it's just science that's the way that this works but either way you can see why it's important that we arrive at an accurate prediction a fine line as soon as possible but the asteroid is getting harder to track every day and in a couple of months it will be invisible to
any groundbased telescope which is why NASA is authorizing the emergency use of the James web Space Telescope to continue observation of yr4 in March the James web will be pointed Direct directly at our potential City killer and this is going to help us learn a lot about the rock in a very short amount of time because right now all we can see is the light that yr4 is reflecting from the Sun or light that it's blocking out from distant stars as it passes over them but James web can see in the infrared Spectrum which is
invisible light and that's going to allow the Space Telescope to get a clear picture of the object we'll be able to nail down its exact size its composition and its mass and hopefully we'll be able to get a more accurate prediction of where it's going to be 8 years from now either sailing past us or raining down fire on the people of India so let's say that the chances of impact do rise higher we reach 50% 90% 100% chance of impact this is a possibility so what response would we take the Europeans have been the
first to release an initial plan of action and it's going to depend on what we determine the actual size of the asteroid to be the European space agency has put out two scenarios if yr4 turns out to be smaller than 50 m diameter we should evacuate any potential impact zones and just hope for the best but prepare for the worst if the rock is confirmed to be larger than 50 m diameter Issa believes that we should make an attempt to deflect it in space to to impact yr4 and try to push it away from the
earth this would be an extreme measure it's something that has only been tested on a small scale once before NASA's asteroid redirect Mission Dart launched in 2021 a year later the spacecraft arrived at the asteroid dioros and struck it head on dioros is much larger than yr4 it's 177 m in diameter and the dart impact was able to create a meaningful change in the orbit of this rock the advantage of yr4 being a solid chunk of rock is that a kinetic impact will be effective at moving it if we crash into one of the rubble
pile asteroids it's just going to break one big thing into several small things like turning a bullet into shotgun pellets but it wouldn't affect the direction that they're moving but we still know so little about the science of asteroid impact we can change the direction sure but how much control over that do we really have there's a potential disaster scenario where we change the course of yr4 but we don't move it enough and it still hits the Earth anyway maybe we only move the point of impact from India to China the global politics of a
situation like this are going to be an absolute mess this is one thing we can say for certain but until then uncertainty will dominate this story even with the help of James web we are going to lose sight of y4 relatively soon and we're not going to be able to pick it up again until the summer of 2028 and that's going to be the point when decisions need to be made the people in charge will need to say for sure how seriously we are taking the threat anyway the important takeaway for you is that things
are likely to get worse before they get better people will freak out but there's no reason right now for you to be one of them
