An asteroid larger than the Eiffel Tower will not hit the Earth over the weekend.
I'm sorry to let you down.
This is not the news you'd see if you've checked social media this week or read any of the fish-wrappery sites that have breathlessly exclaimed that an asteroid larger than the Eiffel tower will break Earth's orbit.
An asteroid might be hitting Earth on December 11 according to one TikTokker. He has six million followers.
I've known about the asteroid for a while, and I thought that there wouldn't be many media outlets overhyping it.
Nope.
Before writing clickbaity headlines like this, you should talk to an astronomer. An impact is excluded for at least 160 years because 4660 Nereus will pass 4 million km from Earth.
>
Phil Plait is on December 3, 2021.
It's really sad. The image of a rocket launch, which looks like an asteroid burning up in our atmosphere, really drives it home, doesn't it?
Here are the facts.
The asteroid is 300 meters in diameter. It goes from past Mars to just inside Earth's circle. It can get close to Earth because it's tilted about a degree.
How close? The minimum intersection orbit distance, or MOID, is how close the orbits of two objects get. The total area of 4660 Nereus is 600,000 kilometers. Think of it as the closest to us by Nereus.
It's close in terms of distance but a bit of a hike. It's less than twice the distance to the Moon.
That is as close as it can get. It will be 4 million kilometers away when this particular pass happens on December 11, 2021. That hair is more than 10 times farther away than the Moon. Ten times.
The chance of an impact this weekend is zero. It was literally, 0.
What about the future? The NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics site has a list of the close approaches for Nereus. It will get close again and again, but each time it's a miss. The closest it will get is 1.2 million kilometers in 2060.
Does that mean it won't hit us? The gravity of the planets can change the size and shape of asteroids over time. An asteroid could hit us in the future due to the orbital changes. How well we know is dependent on a number of things, including how long we've been observing the asteroid and how long the time baseline is.
We can be very confident that it won't hit us for at least a couple of centuries because of the baseline of 40 years that Nereus has.
NASA categorizes it as a potentially hazardous asteroid because it's bigger than 140 meters and it gets closer than 7.5 million kilometers. This means that in the future it could change its trajectory so that it hits it big enough to cause significant damage.
That day will not be today or for a long time.
That doesn't stop the dis info machinery. It doesn't slow it down.
I was wondering if the phrase "break into Earth's orbit" was used by the sites. It's weird. No astronomer would say that. We'd say, "crossing Earth's orbit" or even more accurately, "closest approach will be..." I'm not sure where that phrase was first used, but I'm pretty sure that many sites use the same wordage in their article copy. That makes me think they used the same syndicated article.
I mentioned it in his video, after he talked about how big and fast Nereus is, and how close it'll get. I wonder how many of his followers absorbed that fact.
This kind of stuff is very upsetting to me. People with fear of outer space get really scared when they hear misleading stories. It's a real fear that they have a hard time controlling, and this just makes it worse. It's cruel.
It's bad science. It's either misleading or wrong. Don't we have enough of that already?
It matters. The public's ability to tell right from wrong has real life consequences. I've been saying this for a long time, and it's still true: There is a narrow path to reality, and once you step off all manners of nonsense seem equally plausible. Why would you want proof?
Maintaining our footing and balance on that path is hard enough. We don't need clickbait-driven sites giving people a push right now.
