Two meteors are moving close to earth today and they can be seen through a regular telescope.
Telescopes from the US state of Arizona discovered on August 26, 2012 QG42 and 2012 QC8, the names of two meteorites. They are heading towards the earth, the moon and will reach their position closest to the earth on September 14, reports National Geographic.
2012 QC8 is approximately 1000 m wide. The shortest distance between it and the earth is 8.7 million km, which is 23 times the distance between the moon and the earth. With a width of 190 to 430m, 2012 QG42 is a smaller meteorite, but closer to the planet. At 1:10 p.m. (Hanoi), this sky stone will fly away from us for about 2.8 million km, or 7.5 times the distance between the moon and the earth.
All calculations show that 2012 QG42 poses no danger to Earth, but it is the closest it has come to Earth in the last hundred years.
“Thus, the 2012 QG42 could become a threat to the blue planet of the future,” said Don Yeomans, director of the near-Earth object program at the US Space Agency.
According to Yeomans, human instruments detected only 1,700 objects the size or larger of 2012 QG42. Every 40,000 years, an object in this group will strike the earth with the equivalent of at least 140 million tonnes of TNT.
“The consequences of the explosion were the birth of a crater with a diameter of at least 3 km,” commented Yeomans.
Hours before 2012 QG42 flew to the position closest to earth and reached its highest brightness, people could observe it with telescopes with a diameter of 30cm or more.
