A “by-murderer” asteroid has a narrow chance of going down to earth. Here’s what to know.

A colossal explosion in the sky that releases energy hundreds of times greater than Hiroshima bomb. A dazzling flash almost as bright as the sun. Shock waves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles.

It may sound apocalyptic, but a newly discovered asteroid almost the size of a football field now has a greater than one percent chance of colliding with the Earth in about eight years.

Such an influence has the potential for destruction on city dances, depending on where it strikes.

Researchers are not in panic yet, but they look closely.

“At this point it is ‘let’s pay close attention, let’s get as many assets as we can observe it,’ Bruce Betts, chief scientist for the Planetary Society, told AFP.

What we know 2024 yr4 and its chances of hitting the ground

Called 2024 YR4The asteroid was first discovered on December 27, 2024 by the El Sauce Observatory in Chile. Based on its brightness, astronomers estimate that it is between 130 and 300 feet wide.

“An asteroid of this size affects the soil on average every few thousand years and can cause serious damage to a local region,” the European Space Agency said in a statement.

By New Year’s Eve, it had landed on the desk of Kelly Fast, acting planetary defense officer at the US Space Agency NASA as a purpose of concern.

“You get observations they fall off again. This one looked like it had the potential to stay around,” she told AFP.

The risk assessment continued to climb, and on January 29, the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a global planetary defense cooperation, issued a note.

According to the latest calculations from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is a 1.6% chance that the asteroid will hit the Earth on December 22, 2032.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 is now assessed to level 3 out of 10 on Torino Impact Hazard Scalewhich is “a close meeting” that guarantees the attention of astronomers and the public.

If it hits, includes possible places of influence across the Eastern Pacific, northern South America, the Atlantic, Africa, the Arab Sea and South Asia, says the Iawn memo.

2024 YR4 follows a very elliptical, four -year track, swinging through the inner planets before shooting past Mars and out towards Jupiter.

Currently, it’s zoomed away from the ground – its next close passport comes only in 2028.

“The odds are very good that not only this does not hit the earth, but at some point in the next months to a few years, the probability will go to zero,” Betts said.

A similar scenario that was unfolded in 2004 with Apophis, an asteroid originally expected to have a 2.7 percent chance of beating the ground in 2029. Further observations excluded an impact.

Category “City Killer”

The most notorious asteroid influence occurred 66 million years ago when a six-miles wide space rock triggered a global winter that wiped out the dinosaurs and 75 percent of all species.

In contrast, 2024 YR4 falls into the “City Killer” category.

“If you put it over Paris or London or New York, you basically wipe out the whole city and some of the surroundings,” said Betts.

The best modern comparison is the Tunguska event of 1908, when an asteroid or comet fragment measuring 30-50 meters, exploding across Siberia and releasing 80 million trees across 770 square miles.

Like Impactor, 2024 YR4 is expected to blast in the sky instead of leaving a crater on the ground.

“We can calculate the energy … using the mass and speed,” said Andrew Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

In 2024 years, the explosion from an airburst would correspond to eight megatons TNT – more than 500 times the force in the Hiroshima bomb.

If it explodes over the sea, the effect would be less worrying unless it happens near a coastline that triggers a tsunami.

Time to prepare

The good news experts emphasize is that we have plenty of time to prepare.

Rivkin led the study for NASAS 2022 DART -MISSIONthat successfully pushed an asteroid out of his course using a spacecraft – a strategy known as a “kinetic influence.”

The asteroid of the target was no threat to Earth, making it an ideal topic of testing.

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t work,” he said. The bigger question is whether large nations would finance such a mission if their own territory was not threatened.

Others there are more experimental ideas.

Lasers could evaporate part of the asteroid to create a pressure effect and push it out of the field. A “gravity tractor”, a large spacecraft that slowly pulls away the asteroid with the help of its own gravitational trait, has also been theorized.

If all else fails, the long warning time means that the authorities can evacuate the impact zone.

“No one should be afraid of this,” said quickly. “We can find these things, do these predictions and have the ability to plan.”

Still, NASA traces close to April and calculates the odds of these roomberg species – including asteroids, meteors and meteorites – that affect the soil.

“The majority of the closest land objects have circuits that do not bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose any risk of influence, but a small fraction of DEMalden potentially dangerous asteroids demands more attention,” according to The website of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the center dedicated to study almost earth objects for NASA.