Africa-Press – Liberia. An asteroid struck the Earth over the weekend, just two hours after it was discovered. Designated 2022 EB5, the small rocky object impacted the planet on March 11 north of Iceland, according to numerous astronomers online.
At just three meters wide, 2022 EB5 was around just half the size of an average male giraffe, which grows to be around five-six meters in height. As such, it was unlikely to do any damage if it had impacted the planet.
The 2022 EB5 had harmlessly burned up in the atmosphere, and it is unknown if any residual fragments have actually survived intact. Some in Iceland have reported hearing a boom or seeing a flash of light around this time, and the International Meteor Organization is looking for witness reports of anyone who may have seen anything. The asteroid itself was only discovered just two hours prior to impact by Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky.
Dangers of asteroids
Asteroids are potentially one of the most dangerous natural disasters the planet could experience, especially since there is currently no immediate way to stop them.
According to research from the Davidson Institute of Science, the educational arm of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, an asteroid over 140 meters in diameter would release an amount of energy at least a thousand times greater than that released by the first atomic bomb if it impacted Earth.
Something even larger – over 300 meters wide like the asteroid Apophis – could destroy an entire continent. An asteroid over a kilometer in width – like 138971 (2001 CB21), which flew past the Earth in early March – could trigger a worldwide cataclysm.
Even small asteroids have the potential to cause damage, however. The last asteroid impact prior to 2022 EB5 was in 2013 when a small asteroid around 17-20 meters wide impacted, exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia.
While the impact itself wasn’t severe, the shockwave caused thousands of windows to shatter and saw many injured and in need of medical attention due to the shattered glass.
It is for this reason that scientists worldwide have worked to study the many asteroids in space and catalog them, calculating their trajectories and anticipating any possible impact events. And there are many of them.
Asteroids make up one of the most numerous types of objects in the solar system. Currently, over 1,113,000 asteroids are known to exist in the solar system, according to NASA, but those are just the ones definitively identified, with experts always finding more. Luckily, they can usually be identified due to the many powerful telescopes at the disposal of astronomers. However, not all of them are.
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