Astronomer saw an asteroid three hours before it hit Canada

sarahjay1 (69)memberin Popular STEM • 2 years ago

(Twitter / @GeorgeWHerbert https://bit.ly/3tLxtT1)

An asteroid named 2022 WJ1 was discovered on Saturday night, and fell in the vicinity of Grimsby, Canada just a few hours after the discovery.

Fragments of the body have not yet been found, but many people saw the flight of the fireball over densely populated areas in southern Canada.

Large asteroids half a kilometer in size, capable of leading to a global catastrophe, are successfully discovered and tracked by terrestrial observatories.

Astronomers can warn of a threat decades before their trajectory becomes potentially hazardous to the Earth.

But as the history of the Chelyabinsk asteroid has shown, even relatively small bodies (10-20 meters) can create serious problems.

And unfortunately, astronomers can detect them in advance only if certain circumstances are successful.

In recent years, such circumstances have begun to arise more and more often, despite the fact that 35-40 cases of falling space bodies are recorded on Earth every year.

THE NEW IMPACT
The first time an impact was predicted was in 2008: a four-meter asteroid named 2008 TC3 was discovered 19 hours before the fall in northern Africa.

Then, shortly before the fall, four more objects were discovered - 2014 AA, 2018 LA, 2019 MO and 2022 EB5. Asteroid 2022 WJ1 is the sixth on this list.

Observer David Rankin discovered the asteroid at 05:34 GMT on Saturday November 19 in images taken by the 1.5-meter wide-field telescope of the Catalina Sky Survey.

Almost immediately it was possible to determine that the object, which received the temporary designation C8FF042, should fall in the Great Lakes region in a few hours.

(Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science / NASA https://go.nasa.gov/3tKSZHN)

By 14:00 GMT, the Minor Planet Center issued a circular announcing the discovery and officially assigning the object the index 2022 WJ1.

However, the event had already happened: at 08:27 it had already fallen somewhere on the western shore of Lake Ontario.

The bolide flew over the densely populated southern regions of Canada and was observed by many people.

The website of the American Meteor Society alone contains 54 reports about it. The space rock was caught on numerous cameras, including a webcam that shows the TV tower in Toronto.

According to scientists, the size of the object is unlikely to exceed a meter, so it almost completely collapsed in the atmosphere and its fragments have not yet been found.

In addition, if they reached the surface of the earth, a significant part of them could end up in the lake.

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