Is our end near? Asteroids, fireballs are coming closer
The risk of a sizeable asteroid hitting the Earth is significantly growing every few years, warn Czech scientists who analysed 144 fireballs from a recent meteor shower.
The Taurid meteor shower showed significantly enhanced activity in 2015. Researchers found that this was due to a well-defined orbital structure. 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 decametre 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.
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.
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