Asteroid 2012 LZ1

Asteroid 2012 LZ1

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.

Image: largest known asteroids (above).

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.