Asteroid Nearly Hits Earth in Siberian Fireball

An asteroid just came careening into our atmosphere, burning up in a dramatic fireball over Russia.

The asteroid, formally named 2024 XA1, measured about 28 inches across, and had only been spotted a mere 12 hours before it collided with our planet's atmosphere.

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced in a post to X that the asteroid had arrived yesterday evening, lighting up the sky above Siberia's Yakutia region as it burned up due to the intense friction with the atmosphere.

A file photo of a fireball meteor (main) and the ESA map of the asteroid's expected entry location above Yakutia in northern Siberia (inset). The asteroid, named 2024 XA1, was detected only 12 hours before... ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS / ESA

"Asteroid #C0WEPC5 (temporary designation) entered Earth's atmosphere at 16:15 UTC/17:15 CET, creating a fireball over Yakutia witnessed by people in the region," ESA said in the post. "The object was discovered roughly 12 hours ago and is thought to have been around 70 cm across."

"Thanks to observations from astronomers around the world, our alert system was able to predict this impact to within +/- 10 seconds."

This asteroid is only the 11th object that we have managed to detect before it arrived at our planet's atmosphere, and the fourth this year alone. This "imminent impactor" was spotted by Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

The first imminent impactor this year was a 3.3-foot-wide rock named 2024 BX1, which burned up over Berlin in January, followed by 2024 RW1 over the Philippines on September 4 and 2024 UQ over Hawaii on October 22, which had only been spotted two hours before its arrival.

The newest asteroid, C0WEPC5, was spotted by many people across the Yakutia region of Siberia, with several videos of the spectacular fireball being posted to social media by observers. It is unclear if any of the asteroid survived its journey to Earth.

Asteroids are rocky objects that orbit the Sun, primarily found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and range in size from small rocks to objects hundreds of miles across. If an asteroid or a smaller meteoroid (which are usually less than 3 feet across) enters the Earth's atmosphere, they become meteors, which are the streaks of light produced when an object enters Earth's atmosphere and burns up.

As the rocky object travels through our atmosphere, it compresses the air in front of it, which heats up to extremely high temperatures and causes its outer layers to vaporize in a process called ablation. This creates the bright streak of light known as a "shooting star." A fireball is an exceptionally bright meteor, often bright enough to be visible during daylight.

They rarely reach Earth's surface as they usually burn up completely, but any remains that survive the journey are known as meteorites.

"Meteorites are actually cold by the time they hit the ground, despite the outside being hot as it goes through the atmosphere there's no time for the whole thing to heat up, only the very outer layer, and the heat is dispersed very quickly – well before it hits the ground," Annemarie E. Pickersgill, a meteorite-impact scientist at the University of Glasgow, told Newsweek.

"Something that many people don't realise is that there is a period of time when the rock is still moving through the atmosphere, but no longer moving fast enough to have the stereotypical glow (this is a period known as "dark flight")."

As of October 31, 30 asteroids had passed closer to the Earth than the moon in the previous 30 days, with 132 coming within this region since October 2023.

One massive asteroid, named 2020 XR, is due to soar past our cosmic neighborhood today, coming some 1,370,000 miles from our planet. 2020 XR is estimated by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) to have a diameter of between 951 feet and 2,133 feet.

This asteroid's immense size and relative proximity classifies it as both a Near-Earth Object (NEO) and a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA). NEOs are defined as coming within 120 million miles of the sun, while PHAs must travel within 4.6 million miles of our planet, and also have a diameter of at least 460 feet.

"A potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is one that has an orbit intersecting the Earth's orbit around the Sun by less than 0.05 astronomical units (1 AU is the distance to the Sun), that's just over 4.5 million miles," Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the U.K., previously told Newsweek.

"It also has to have an absolute brightness of 22.0 or less (lower values of the magnitude are brighter = larger objects), i.e. an asteroid (or comet) that would cause significant regional damage if it hit the Earth," Barstow added. "Not all NEOs are potentially hazardous, but all hazardous objects are NEOs."

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