A “potentially hazardous” asteroid, almost the size of the world’s tallest skyscraper, will pass Earth this week.
Live Science reports that the asteroid, called 2022 RM4, has an estimated diameter of 1,083-2,428 feet or 330-740 meters, just under Dubai’s 2,716-foot-tall Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. The asteroid will barely pass our planet at around 52,500 mph, roughly 68 times the speed of sound.
Asteroid 2022 RM4 was discovered on September 12, 2022, when it was 0.61 AU (91 million kilometers) from Earth and located at declination +65 near the northern circumpolar star Zeta Draconis.
The actual distance between Earth and the asteroid is six times the Earth’s distance from the moon, Forbes reports, which is very close by cosmic standards. The asteroid will come within approximately 1.43 million miles of Earth when it reaches its closest approach on Nov. 1.
Space.com reports the asteroid is the largest “potentially hazardous” asteroid spotted in the past eight years and astronomers have dubbed it a “planet killer” because the effects of its impact would be felt across multiple continents.
According to NASA, a near-Earth-object (NEO) such as an asteroid or comet is defined as being “potentially hazardous” based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth.
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech
This means that the asteroid’s considered “potentially hazardous” have an orbit that places them within 48.3 million kilometers (30 million miles) from Earth.
The asteroid belongs to a group found within the orbits of Earth and Venus, but they’re incredibly difficult to observe because the brightness of the sun shields them from telescope observations.
An international team of scientists spotted the 2022 RM4 along with several others while using the Dark Energy Camera located on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope located at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, according to CNN.
Their findings were published Monday in The Astronomical Journal.
“Our twilight survey is scouring the area within the orbits of Earth and Venus for asteroids,” said lead study author Scott S. Sheppard, an astronomer at the Earth & Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, in a statement.
He added that “Only about 25 asteroids with orbits completely within Earth’s orbit have been discovered to date because of the difficulty of observing near the glare of the sun.”
“So far we have found two large near-Earth asteroids that are about 1 kilometer across, a size that we call planet killers.”
Astronomers currently monitor over 2,200 potentially hazardous asteroids, space rocks that orbit dangerously close to Earth and are wider than 0.6 miles [1 km]. Such asteroids are of the greatest concern as they would cause widespread destruction, potentially affecting the entire planet.
