NASA scientists have been able to determine the exact location - otherwise known as the 'risk corridor' - where impending asteroid 2024 YR4 is likely to strike Earth, and it could prove capable of wiping out entire cities.
Ever since it was discovered in December 2024, scientists have been fixated on the orbit of asteroid 2024 YR4, which is currently on a path towards Earth.
Initial projections estimated that it only had a 1% chance of colliding with our planet, but these odds have recently doubled to 2.3% with concerns continuing to grow throughout NASA.
Currently there's not too much that we concretely know about 2024 YR4, as scientists still haven't been able to accurately identify its size and velocity.
Advert
However, it is understood to be somewhere in between 40 and 90 meters wide, and is likely to reach Earth by 2032.
Part of the difficulty comes with the limited time that we have to study it, as there's only a few months left before it disappears from view, resurfacing again in 2028.
Thankfully NASA are now using the James Webb Space Telescope to get far greater readings of the asteroid, as its able to use MIRI instruments to analyze heat on its surface as opposed to relying on light reflected from the Sun.
What scientists have been able to more accurately predict right now is the areas that it's likely to strike if it does happen to collide with Earth, which has been outlined as a 'risk corridor' by engineer David Rankin at NASA's Catalina Sky Survey Project.
Rankin indicates that 2024 YR4 will likely strike anywhere between northern South America, across the Pacific Ocean, southern Asia, the Arabian Sea, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Countries that are particularly at risk include India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, and it's also predicted that the impact would be enough to wipe out an entire city with the power five hundred times that of an atomic bomb.
Something one famous physicist has proposed is to immediately start building preventative methods that negate the risk altogether, regardless of how small it is, as this is the Universe's way of testing whether humanity can adequately prepare.
This will likely take the form of a Double Asteroid Redirection Test, otherwise known as DART, which NASA has deployed before, but one scientist has outlined why this might not be the best idea.
In a thread on X, Dr. Robin George Andrews explains: "Asteroids like Dimorphos [which was targeted by DART], and smaller, tend to be rubble piles: not solid single rocks, but boulders weakly bound by their own gravity. Hitting them just right can produce that debris-like thrust effect, but if you hit them too hard, you'll shatter them.
"Nobody want's to accidentally 'disrupt' an asteroid, because those components can still head for Earth. As I often say, it's like turning a cannonball into a shotgun spray."
This would have significant ramifications on the areas affected by a potential collision, as while there wouldn't be a single impact as devastating, the 'shotgun-like' effect would wreak havoc on a much wider scale across out planet, so we have to be extremely careful.