Many have developed a newfound anxiety upon viewing a video illustrating the immense size of a near-Earth asteroid that could potentially collide with New York City.
The asteroid is estimated to be approximately twice the size of Manhattan Island in New York City, a dimension brought to life through a chilling simulation video. In the brief clip, viewers witness the hypothetical scenario of the peculiarly shaped asteroid hovering just inches above New York City without making contact with the planet.
Uploaded on Reddit on November 10, the video has garnered over 10,000 upvotes, with commenters expressing their alarm at the potential devastation if such an asteroid were to collide with Earth.
One user remarked, "Picture the Earth's crust instantly transforming into liquid, with the entire world submerged in lava."
"I'm not certain if this asteroid is large enough to cause global surface liquefaction, but I have strong reservations. Nevertheless, the atmosphere would undoubtedly transform into an oven," replied another commenter.
"I'm fairly certain this is larger than what led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the planet took ages to recover," added another.
The Eros asteroid is in fact bigger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, which is believed to have been around 10-15 km wide.
Before we give in to panic though, when we say near-Earth, the closest it actually tends to get is 22 million km away from our planet.
That means we don't have to worry too much about it plonking itself down on NYC in the near-future, but scientists revealed in 1998 that there is a roughly five percent chance it will hit Earth eventually.
However, the end isn't nigh quite yet. Scientists from the University of Pisa modelled Eros' potential orbits in 1996, and found a hypothetical collision scheduled for 1.14 million years in the future.
With NASA already working on a defence system to shield us from killer asteroids, hopefully we'll have worked out what to do about Eros by then if it does head our way.
0 commentaires :