Trio of city-killing asteroids could soon strike Earth, study predicts

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Three city-killing asteroids could strike Earth in weeks without warning, according to the authors of a published study.

Venus is concealing the dangerous asteroids, the authors say.

“Twenty co-orbital asteroids (space rocks in the orbit of two celestial bodies) of Venus are currently known,” the authors warned in the study, which was published in the journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The international research team was led by Valerio Carruba, of Sao Paulo University, in Brazil. The team wrote that at least three of the asteroids — 2020 SB, 524522, and 2020 CL1 — that circle the Sun in tandem with our twin planet have unstable orbits which take them dangerously close to Earth, the U.K. Daily Mail reported.

The study says that, if the trajectory is shifted even slightly by a small gravitational change or other force, they could be set on a collision course with our planet.

“Co-orbital status protects these asteroids from close approaches to Venus, but it does not protect them from encountering Earth,” the researchers warned, according to the Daily Galaxy.

The research team reached this conclusion by using imitation space rocks to simulate a range of possible outcomes over 36,000 years. They found that there is a sizable population of low-eccentricity asteroids (previously thought to be harmless) which could be propelled toward Earth via gravitational shifts and other factors.

The aforementioned cosmic rocks’ orbits make them almost invisible to Earthly detection devices.

Scientists at NASA and other space agencies regularly track potential hazardous near-Earth asteroids, but the telescopes can’t spot rocks in a sub-orbital path with Venus due to the sun’s glare, which shields them like a cosmic cloaking device, WION reported.

Due to this interstellar blindspot, the Rubin Observatory in Chile would have only two to four weeks to spot deadly asteroids, leaving us little time if they were on a collision course.

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“Low-e (low eccentricity) Venus co-orbitals pose a unique challenge, because of the difficulties in detecting and following these objects from Earth,” the authors wrote in their conclusion.

Asteroids 2020 SB, 524522, and 2020 CL1, measure between 100 metres and 400 metres in diameter, making each one capable of destroying entire cities and causing massive fires and tsunamis, the Daily Mail reported.

An impact would leave a crater more than three kilometres wide and generate 1 million times more energy than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945.