Is there any way to get it here sooner?
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Astronomy
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Fucking finally goddamn
Reading this headline instantly brought a huge smile to my face 😁
Can we speed that up a bit?
Wow this is the most depressing comment section I've ever seen.
it's just standard "haha self harm funi", it's so easy to post and reliably gets a few upvotes, so it's just a kneejerk response to posts like these.
Yeah, even for Lemmy this is bad. I hope most of them are semi-facetious?
Scientists estimate that 2024 YR4 is between 130 to 300 feet (40 and 90 meters) wide, large enough to cause localized devastation near the impact site. The asteroid responsible for the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia, was probably about the same size.
So nothing to worry about
Provided it enters in a similarly uninhabited location.
Sarcasm?
Idk about you but if it levels 1287 km² of forest, I don't think that would exactly be good news for a populated area. On the upper range, it could be equivalent to a 40 megatonne bomb.
Which direction do I need to fart to up those numbers?
Those are rookie numbers. Gotta pump those numbers up.
I'm team asteroid.
Unexpected Waterworld dipstick guy
He's my go-to for posts like these
Underutilized meme format, honestly. It can apply to almost anything in daily life circa 2025.
I wonder if the "important" people know the chances are higher, so they're going for broke in order to build their escape ship.
Panic?
I'm crossing my fingers for the wellbeing of the universe. We're awful.
Worry not, for we are insignificant to the universe.
Right now.
Forever, humanity could only ever conceivably expand so far due to the expansion of the universe, so as far as we know a still insignificant portion of the universe we could colonize.
Until we make some scientific breakthrough which might solve that problem. If there is any possible of course. There is so much we still don't know.
That's 0.9% more than the last time I checked. I know those are still really low odds, but we can hope...
I science podcast I follow already warned last week that the probability would go up at first as they narrow down its trajectory.
They gave the example of a fan closing, as it gets narrow, the earth represents a bigger percentage of the remaining fan. If you keep closing the fan the Earth eventually will fall outside the fan and the percentage drop to zero.
Unless it turns out that it is dead center.
One of the things they're doing is calculating what it's orbit would have to be to hit the Earth, and where it would have had to have been on its last orbit to be in that orbit
So they can look at any astronomical images of that part of the sky from then and see if it's in the right place
If they find images of the right part of the sky at the right time and the asteroid is not in it, they know it's not on an orbit that will hit the Earth in 2032
don’t worry, it’ll just be like a small nuke, not a planet killer… (until they update the size estimates)
If we are able to nudge an asteroid, would an asteroid of this size nudge the earth?
Technically the solar system is a multi-body system, and everything nudges everything else, but the mass of the earth is far greater than the mass of the asteroid, to the point that it doesn't matter.
Sigh. Why can't it be 109%
This place sucks.
It's not big enough to fix anything. If it hits, it won't hit America or Europe
It's in the big nuke scale of energy, enough to do a lot of damage to a small area. Were it to hit a city, the city would need a lot of rebuilding. Were it to hit, few people would be in danger as we will have years of warning. The only people in the impact area would be "storm chasers" travelling to see the impact
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