High risk of collision between Earth and giant asteroid, warn scientists courtesy of meteoroid stream

Doomsday predictions have been made in the past on several occasion, however, they have turned out to be false. But what may bring us doomsday is a claim made by scientists who have warned that our planet Earth may be hit by asteroids.

Scientists have made this claim courtesy of a meteoroid stream that was recently discovered. If Earth is put on a collision course with this meteoroid stream by the planet’s trajectory, it could lead to devastating series of asteroid strikes.

Astronomers from the Czech Academy of Sciences published the findings, Seeker has reported. The meteoroid streams are made up of tiny space rocks that burns up during entry, hence they are normally harmless.

However, Comet Encke likely left behind the stream discovered by the scientists. The stream contains rocks as big as 300 meters (1,000 feet) in diameter.

Scientists have found these ones. There may be more rocks hidden in the stream, which could have even bigger asteroids. The astronomers are now looking forward to find these rocks and determine if they are indeed on a collision course with the Earth.

The paper was published by the scientists in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal. The scientists noted that some of these rocks could be hundreds of meters in diameter. Though they are not global catastrophes but can do quite a bit of damage. 

“Since asteroids of sizes of tens to hundreds meters pose a threat to the ground even if they are intrinsically weak, impact hazard increases significantly when the Earth encounters the Taurid new branch every few years,” the paper reads. 

“Further studies leading to better description of this real source of potentially hazardous objects, which can be large enough to cause significant regional or even continental damage on the Earth, are therefore extremely important.”

Taurid meteor shower:

Czech scientists analysed 144 fireballs from a recent meteor shower and warned that the risk of a sizeable asteroid hitting the Earth is significantly growing every few years.

The Taurid meteor shower showed significantly enhanced activity in 2015. This was due to a well-defined orbital structure, researchers found.

Researchers from the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences showed that a "new branch" of Taurids contains at least two asteroids of the size 200-300 metres.

Since it is likely that numerous of undiscovered asteroids of decameter or even larger size are present as well, impact hazard increases significantly when the Earth encounters the Taurid new branch every few years, researchers said.

The Taurid meteoroid stream produces at least four meteor showers on Earth: two are active at night from end of September until beginning of December, and two at day from end of May to the middle of July.

Although comet 2P/Encke is the most probable parent body of the Taurid stream, it was also proposed that 2P/Encke is just a fragment of a much larger comet, which was disrupted thousands years ago and formed the whole Taurid complex including a number of asteroids.
Nevertheless, many of the proposed asteroids may have similar orbits just by chance.

In some years, Taurid activity has been higher than usually, especially in terms of large numbers of bright meteors or fireballs.

"We performed careful analysis of 144 Taurid fireballs observed by new digital autonomous fireball observatories  of the European Fireball Network  displaced over Czech Republic at 13 stations, Austria and Slovakia in 2015, when the activity was enhanced," researchers said.

Orbits of 113 fireballs show common characteristics and form together a well defined orbital structure.

The masses of the observed meteoroids were in a wide range from 0.1 gramme to more than 1,000 kg.

"We found that all meteoroids larger than 300 grammes were very fragile, while those smaller than 30 grammes were much more compact," researchers said.

The newly discovered Taurid branch is a population of bodies with the size range from several millimetres to several hundred of meters, which all move together around the Sun.

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The narrow range of orbital parameters of the new branch makes the association of Taurids with these asteroids much more reliable than it was possible before.
Every few years, the Earth is encountering this branch for a period of about three weeks.

During that time, the chance of impact of a sizeable asteroid (tens of meters) is significantly enhanced. Even if intrinsically weak, bodies of such size can penetrate deep in the atmosphere and pose a hazard to the ground.

(With inputs from PTI)