fr en es pt
Astronomy
 
Contact the author rss astronoo
 
 

Asteroid 2012 LZ1

Asteroid 2012 LZ1

Updated June 01, 2013

Once again, we did not see coming towards us.
But the asteroid 2012 LZ1 found in May 2012 by the Uppsala Schmidt telescope in Australia, had a huge size of 500 meters and came close to 5 million km from Earth, June 16, 2012. This distance is extremely small compared to the distances of the solar system.
This asteroid 500 meters in diameter discovered at the last moment, fell off the Earth at a distance large enough to pose no danger of collision, astronomers reported the Australian National University, directed by Rob McNaught. Then the measurements obtained using the Arecibo radio telescope have given a size of 1 km in diameter, fortunately, does this asteroid, safe for 750 years to come.
"Occasionally, an asteroid comes out of nowhere like this, which is actually pretty big," said Patrick Paolucci, told AFP. Many small rocky bodies called asteroids are present in the solar system, a significant portion of them circulate in a ring between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter between 2 and 4 AU (symbol: AU) The mean distance of the Earth in the Sun. An AU is worth 149 597 871 km. It is a unity often used for the distances in the solar system, or for the space of two stars in a double system. , in what astronomers call the belt asteroid, also known main belt. It marks the boundary between the terrestrial planets and gas giants. An asteroid is a celestial object is not observable to the naked eye because of its small size which varies from a few tens of meters to several hundred kilometers in diameter and is part of our solar system.
Objects of less than 50 m in diameter are called meteorites. The size of this object is sufficient to make huge damage on our planet.
Let us remember that just 50 meters from an object to make a crater like the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona. A meteorite 500 meters would cause a crater 10 kilometers across and kill a billion people in the tsunami triggered across a terrestrial hemisphere. A meteorite of 1 km would cause a crater 20 kilometers across and would kill 2 to 3 billion people in the tsunami triggered across a terrestrial hemisphere. The probability of this happening is once every 150,000 years.

Photography the asteroid 2012 LZ1.asteroid 2012 LZ1

An asteroid is classified as near-Earth object if its size is greater than 152 meters and the distance less than 7.5 million kilometers from Earth.
NASA has already identified 9,000 of these small bodies potentially dangerous.

Asteroids Approximate
dimensions
Discovery
date
     
Ceres 1 974.6 km 1801
Pallas 2 582×556×500 km 1802
Vesta 4 572.6x557.2x446 km 1807
Hygiea 10 530x407x370 km 1849
Sylvia 87 384x262x232 km 1866
Hektor 624 370x195x195 km 1907
Europa 52 360x315x240 km 1858
Eunomia 15 357x355x212 km 1851
Davida 511 357x294x231 km 1903
Interamnia 704 350.3x303.6 km 1910
Camilla 107 344x246x205 km 1868
Juno 3 320x267x200 km 1804
Cybele 65 302x290x232 km 1861
Hermione 121 268x186x183 km 1872
Euphrosyne 31 255.9 km 1854
Chariklo 10199 248x258 km 1997
Iris 7 240x200x200 km 1847
Psyche 16 240x185x145 km 1852
Daphne 41 239x183x153 km 1856
Kalliope 22 235x144x124 km 1852
Amphitrite 29 233x212x193 km 1854

Image: largest known asteroids (above).

asteroid crater

Image: The crater filled with water Dellen in Sweden is the trace of a meteorite, roughly circular, fell to Earth.
The age of the crater is about 90 million years, it is located in the Upper Cretaceous and its diameter is about 19 ​​km, the estimated diameter of the meteorite is 1000 meters.

NB: The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) is a joint research project of the U.S. Air Force, NASA and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
LINEAR robotic telescopes have detected the September 15, 2011, 231,082 asteroids, 2,432 comets and 279 objects cruisers.


1997 © Astronoo.com − Astronomy, Astrophysics, Evolution and Ecology.
"The data available on this site may be used provided that the source is duly acknowledged."