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Science & Tech.
Mahesh

06/11/22 16:42 PM IST

Astronomers discover an asteroid that could destroy planets

In News 
  • A group of scientists has found three enormous near-Earth asteroids that were concealing from the Sun’s light.
  • One of them, 2022 AP7, is “possibly harmful” to Earth and is thought to be the greatest planet-killer-sized asteroid to have been discovered in a decade.
About 2022 AP7 
  • The three asteroids are part of a group that is located within the orbits of Earth and Venus. They are difficult to see, though, because the Sun’s brightness prevents telescopic views of them.
  • The scientists only observed during twilight hours, a brief but ideal 10-minute window each night, because they were obscured by the Sun’s brightness.
  • At the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, they made use of a Dark Energy Camera.
  • They were able to photograph vast areas of the sky with the use of a high-tech camera that was part of the NOIRLAB initiative of the US National Science Foundation (NSF).
  • The camera was first created to perform a Dark Energy Survey, which was carried out between 2013 and 2019 by the US Department of Energy and the NSF.
  • The asteroids are blurred and deformed by the Earth’s atmosphere because they are near the horizon, which presented the astronomers with a further challenge in addition to dealing with the Sun’s glare.
Asteroids
  • Asteroids are small, airless rocky worlds revolving around the sun that are too small to be called planets. They are also known as planetoids or minor planets.
  • In total, the mass of all the asteroids is less than that of Earth’s moon. But despite their size, asteroids can be dangerous. Many have hit Earth in the past, and more will crash into our planet in the future.

    Source- The Hindu 

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