Okay, asteroid 2024 YR4, you have our attention
Astronomers—both professional and amateur—are now focused on an asteroid that has a slight chance of impacting Earth in 2032. Although additional observations are needed, the asteroid may be large enough to cause significant damage, prompting further observations and searches of archival data for any pre-discovery observations. The discovery represents only the second time that an asteroid’s impact risk has exceeded 1% chance.
The asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, was first observed on December 27, 2024, by Chile’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). One month later, on Monday, January 27, NASA’s Sentry impact-tracking system officially elevated the asteroid to a level 3 on the Torino scale.
The potential destruction from 2024 YR4 – meh or yikes!
German astronomer Daniel Bamberger (Northolt Branch Observatories) has utilized existing observations to narrow down the potential impact date and location: The impact would occur on December 22, 2032, along a lengthy path extending from the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico, through Ecuador and northern South America, across the Atlantic, through central Africa (from Kenya to Somalia), and then over to the northern region India. I’ve drawn the band on the map above (sorry for the shaky line, but hey, I was scared).
Given that the estimated diameter of 2024 YR4 ranges from 130 to 330 feet across — somewhere between the size of a tennis court and a football field — its impact could lead to outcomes ranging from the Chelyabinsk air-blast in 2013 to the ¾-mile-wide Barringer Crater in Arizona. A 300-foot asteroid hitting Earth would cause significant damage to a large region, potentially destroying a city or large urban area, with widespread destruction from shockwaves, fires, and debris depending on the impact location, potentially triggering large-scale tsunamis if hitting a body of water. While it might not cause a global extinction event, it would be a major catastrophic event causing significant loss of life and infrastructure damage. This all depends on the object’s actual size and mass, which are uncertain enough that the potential impact’s magnitude could vary by more than a factor of 10.
We still have time to prepare for our total annihilation
Richard Binzel (MIT), an expert in asteroid observations and the creator of the Torino scale, explained that without more observations, the asteroid’s orbit and its current position in space cannot be determined exactly.
According to NASA and the European Space Agency, the asteroid will gradually fade from view over the next few months. In the meantime, some of the world’s most powerful telescopes will continue to monitor it to better determine its size and trajectory. Once it is out of sight, it won’t be visible again until it passes our way in 2028.
Currently, scientists are examining sky surveys from 2016, which suggest the asteroid also approached closely at that time. If researchers can locate the space rock in those images, they may be able to more definitively determine whether it will collide with the planet or not.
