Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of reckoning and the Day of Atonement, is about to arrive, and four asteroids will come with it, according to NASA’s asteroid tracker.
Two of the asteroids will pass by Earth on Tuesday, October 4, which is Erev Yom Kippur. The other two asteroids will pass in front of the planet on Wednesday, October 5, the day of Yom Kippur.
The four asteroids that will pass by Earth around Yom Kippur have been designated 2022 SM21, 2022 SO11, 2018 VG and 2022 SJ28, according to the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). ) from NASA.
How big is the asteroid that will approach Earth in 2022?
It turns out that the four asteroids that will pass by Earth on Yom Kippur are quite small, NASA says.
The first to come, asteroid 2022 SM21, is estimated to be between 9 and 20 meters wide.
To put it into perspective, 20 meters is about half the size of an average telephone pole.
However, while asteroid 2022 SM21 doesn’t measure up to the other three Yom Kippur asteroids in terms of size, it leaves all of them in their figured cosmic dust in terms of speed.
According to calculations by NASA’s CNEOS, asteroid 2022 SM21 is heading towards Earth’s orbit at a speed of about 15.07 kilometers per second, which is approximately equivalent to 54,252 kilometers per hour or about 44 times the speed of sound. .
To put this insane speed metric in context, that’s about 22 times faster than a Patriot missile.
The next asteroid that comes is also small. Asteroid 2022 SO11 is barely larger than its predecessor, measuring between 11 and 25 meters across. In terms of speed, it is also below the other, with about 12.41 kilometers per second, which is equivalent to 44,676 kilometers per hour or just over 36 times the speed of sound.
These two asteroids will pass by Earth on the day Yom Kippur begins, October 4. The first asteroid to pass on the same day as Yom Kippur, October 5, is 2018 VG. this asteroid it is even smaller, measuring between 8.8 and 20 meters, and only flies at a relatively modest speed of about 6.67 kilometers per second, or about 24,012 kilometers per hour. That’s still fast, almost 20 times the speed of sound, but it’s still much slower than the other two.
The last asteroid to arrive on Yom Kippurasteroid 2022 SJ28, is the largest of the group, with a width that ranges between 14 and 32 meters, although it is still on the smaller side. It’s also slightly faster than its predecessor, clocking in at 9.24 kilometers per second.
Will an asteroid collide with Earth in 2022?
Yom Kippur is the time when, according to Jewish beliefs, God writes down our destinies in the Book of Life, judging our actions and deciding who lives and who dies. For this reason, the tone of the holiday, centered on repentance, atonement and judgment, can make some apocalyptic scenarios fearful.
Well, God’s intervention would certainly be necessary for these asteroids to actually cause such divine apocalyptic catastrophes, because as it stands now, according to NASA calculations, these asteroids are nothing to worry about.
The closest asteroid around Yom Kippur is asteroid 2022 SO11. It is estimated that this asteroid will pass by Earth at a distance of just over a million kilometers.
On a cosmic scale, this is pretty close, all things considered.
Consider NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, launched last year and currently in space changing the way we see the cosmos. That telescope is currently at the Lagrange point L2, which is about 1.5 million kilometers away. This means that asteroid 2022 SM21 will theoretically fly closer to Earth than the James Webb Space Telescope.
That said, though, it’s still pretty far off on a practical level. The Moon, after all, orbits the Earth at a distance of about 384,000 kilometers on average. That’s much closer than the asteroid, so Earth is in no danger of being hit this Yom Kippur without some divine intervention.
And divine intervention would also certainly be necessary for the asteroid to not only hit Earth, but actually do some damage.
According to research by the Davidson Institute of Sciences, the educational arm of the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Israel, an asteroid 140 meters in diameter or more would release an amount of energy at least a thousand times greater than that released by the first atomic bomb if it hit a the earth.
An even larger asteroid, more than 300 meters wide, like the Apophis asteroid, could destroy an entire continent. An asteroid more than a kilometer wide – such as asteroid 138971 (2001 CB21), which passed by Earth in early March 2022 – could trigger a global cataclysm.
With its size, asteroid 2022 SM21 would, at best, cause a loud explosion upon entering the atmosphere. As for the actual damage, it would be minimal or completely non-existent.
But as for the question of whether an asteroid will collide with Earth in 2022, the answer is yes. Or rather, it has already happened.
In March 2022, a small asteroid about the size of half a giraffe, known as 2022 EB5, slammed into Earth just hours after its discovery. But given how small it was, it didn’t exactly do any damage either.
