Asteroids: biggest planet killer discovered

The largest destroyer of planets found in recent years hid thanks to the glow of the Sun along with two others. l’asteroid 2022 AP7 it is considered potentially dangerous because it travels in orbit that puts it within 7.5 million kilometers of . brings Country and owns a diameter of about 1.5 kilometers. At the moment, however, there is no indication of an imminent collision with our planet.

The discovery, the result of twilight observations by researchers at the Inter-American Observatory of Cerro Tololo in Chile, has already been published in The Astronomical Journal and was announced by NOIRLab in the United States.

The asteroid 2022 AP7 is one of the largest potentially dangerous asteroids discovered in the past eight years: it was first observed on January 13 thanks to the four-meter-long Víctor M. Blanco telescope in Chile. Apollo and is considered potentially dangerous because it has a diameter of more than 140 meters and approaches Earth below the threshold of 7.5 million kilometers.

At the moment, however, there is no data that would make us think of an imminent collision with our planet, so much so that it has been removed from the list of bodies to be monitored at risk of impact, both by the Coordination Center for Near Earth Objects of the European Space Agency (ESA) and of the Sentry System of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Jpl).

Gianluca Masi, Scientific Director of the Virtual Telescope

The asteroid was found along with two other celestial bodies, also hidden from sunlight, named 2021 LJ4 And 2021 PH27. Unlike 2022 AP7, these two have orbits that remain at a safe distance from our planet. Interestingly, 2021 is PH27, as it is the closest asteroid to the sun, reaching the melting temperature of Lead.