‘City killer' asteroid may hit the Moon in December 2032 could threaten satellites around Earth; experts warn
Asteroid 2024 YR4 is not expected to strike Earth, but more and more, scientists worry that it could collide with the Moon. According to the experts at the University of Western Ontario caution that such an impact would hurl more than 100 million kilograms of rubbish into space. This fast-moving lunar material can be a grave hazard to satellites in low Earth orbit employed for communication, GPS, and climate observation and even put astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) at risk. With increased satellite networks and human space activity, the severity of the implications of a Moon impact by asteroid 2024 YR4 calls for immediate international consideration and readiness.
City-killer asteroid 2024 YR4 could crash into moon, pose satellite danger
When 2024 YR4 was initially monitored, it seemed to be a potential threat to Earth. But subsequent observation eliminated a direct Earth impact. Instead, simulations now indicate a higher chance of it striking the Moon, with probabilities increasing from 3.8% to 4.3%. While that seems low, it is sufficient to lead scientists to track closely the asteroid's path and simulate likely effects.
If the asteroid does hit the Moon, the released energy might be the equivalent of 6.5 megatons of TNT-more than 400 times the Hiroshima bomb (0.015 megatons). A 1-kilometer-wide crater would probably be created by the impact, likely somewhere in the southern hemisphere of the Moon.
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The collision is thought to shoot approximately 100 million kilograms of lunar rock and dust into space-debris that will not simply disappear into thin air. Of greatest concern is that approximately 10% of the lunar debris may make its way towards Earth within days after impact. Most of it will be minuscule, but particles greater than 0.1 millimeters can be hazardous enough to penetrate or harm satellites and spacecraft. These pieces will remain in orbit, risking long-term damage to space-based infrastructure.
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Asteroid 2024 YR4 impact may risk satellites as orbital traffic increases
The number of satellites around the Earth is likely to surge exponentially by 2032 due to worldwide expansion in telecommunications, navigation, and observation of the Earth. Most of these satellites will be in low Earth orbit (LEO)—the very zone that would be impacted by debris from a lunar impact.
The Western Ontario team of the university ran 10,000 simulations of impacts. In 410 of them, the asteroid struck the Moon head-on, and the next few days exhibited the densest concentrations of potentially destructive space debris. Although the study does not directly estimate the risk to human missions, the ISS itself orbits in LEO, so it is a potential target. Even small high-speed pieces of debris have the potential to cause catastrophic damage to spacecraft and threaten the lives of astronauts.
Asteroid 2024 YR4: Variables in the distribution of threat
Scientists highlight that a number of variables will determine the size and distribution of the threat:
Location of impact on the Moon
Speed and direction of asteroid
Size of the crater
Distribution and velocity of the debris ejected
Various permutations of these variables will influence the amount that escapes the Moon's gravity and the amount that gets to Earth's proximity.
Asteroid 2024 YR4: Earth may be safe, but our satellites are not
Although Earth is not in the path of the asteroid, the indirect consequences of a collision with the Moon are significant enough to justify preparation. Contemporary existence relies on satellites for everything from the GPS and internet access to climate monitoring and scientific information. Any disruption in this system of orbits could have worldwide ramifications.
This possible effect is a wake-up call for space agencies to spend money on orbital debris tracking, satellite shielding, and improved risk prediction technologies. Asteroid 2024 YR4 might never graze Earth, but if it crashes into the Moon, it might create havoc in our orbital environment. With over 100 million kilograms of space debris potentially entering Earth's space, the incident highlights just how interdependent celestial bodies are—and how vital it is to track even remote space threats.
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Time of India
3 hours ago
- Time of India
Paris climate target ‘will never die', remains world's ultimate goal: Researchers
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The paper follows the hottest year ever on record, commentary that the 1.5°C target is 'deader than a doornail' and the fact that only 21 out of 195 countries that signed the Paris Agreement have thus far submitted new five-year emissions reduction plans. Warming above 1.5°C greatly increases climate risks, including dangerous sea level rise, the collapse of coral reefs, the loss of the Greenland ice sheet and the dieback of the Amazon rainforest. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Ductless Air Conditioners Are Selling Like Crazy [See Why] Keep Cool Click Here Undo Key arguments in the paper includes: Approaching or exceeding 1.5°C of warming does not extinguish the Paris Agreement's ambitious goal but makes urgent climate action even more important. The exact timing of when the world crosses 1.5°C is less important than sustained efforts to cut emissions. The Paris Agreement remains vital as a global framework to guide emissions cuts and adaptation efforts, despite geopolitical challenges. Professor Rogelj, Director of Research at the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, said: '1.5°C of warming is just around the corner and it will take a herculean effort to avoid it. 'This is deeply concerning, but crossing it makes the target more important because every fraction of warming – whether it is 1.6, 2 or 3°C – creates a more dangerous world and the longer we stay above 1.5°C, the higher the losses and damages for people will be. 'The key message of our paper is that 1.5°C will never die. It will remain our ultimate goal for a safe, livable and just planet. We need to remember that reversing warming is not a new goal, but already a key aim of the Paris Agreement.' The 2015 Paris Agreement aims to keep warming 'well below 2°C' and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. Small island states proposed the 1.5°C target in the late 2000s as a matter of survival – '1.5 to stay alive' – and since 2015, it has become the immediate goal in the fight to tackle climate change. However, the world is not currently on track to keeping warming below the Paris Agreement targets. Most countries are still burning large amounts of fossil fuels, which release emissions that cause the climate to warm. Global warming is expected to exceed 1.5°C before the end of the decade, near 2°C by 2050, and rise to between 2.6°C and 3.1°C over the course of the century. These projections have resulted in commentary that 1.5°C is 'dead' and calls from some researchers to determine the precise timing of when 1.5°C is crossed. Professors Rogelj and Rajamani argue that exceeding 1.5°C does not mean abandoning the goal or triggering a specific policy shift for emissions reductions or adaptation needs but working harder to limit overshoot – the amount of warming experienced above 1.5°C . Their paper emphasises the need for countries to act with the highest ambition possible to bring emissions down to zero, achieve net-negative emissions, and get warming back below 1.5°C in the long-term. They note that even in a world that has crossed 1.5°C, countries and businesses can continue to follow emission pathways aligned with the target. The Paris Agreement remains the most important international tool for tackling climate change, particularly due to its requirement that countries submit plans to cut emissions every five years, the researchers say. While the deadline has been extended until September, just 21 of 195 countries signed up to the Paris Agreement have submitted their plan, known as a Nationally Determined Contribution or NDC. NDCs with the highest possible cuts to emissions will reduce the amount of time the world spends above 1.5°C and reduce harm to human life and ecosystems, the researchers say. Professor Lavanya Rajamani, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, said: 'We want to reframe the way people talk about 1.5°C. Approaching or even surpassing it is a warning signal that states need to redouble their efforts, not to throw up their hands and declare 1.5°C 'over' or 'dead.' 'We need to stay focused on keeping warming below 1.5°C in the long term, and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change for people and the planet.' 'Our position is supported by a growing body of scientific evidence, the terms of the Paris Agreement, and the wider normative environment, including human rights obligations, that states are subject to.' Professor Rogelj, Director of Research at the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, said: 'There is no such thing as a safe level of warming. 'Even below 1.5°C we see dangerous climate change. Devastating weather disasters in 2024 really made that clear – just think of the Valencia floods, Hajj heatwave and Hurricane Helene which collectively killed more than 1,500 people. 'Every tonne of carbon emitted and every fraction of a degree counts. That's why we need to see bold NDCs before the COP30 climate summit in November that deliver meaningful emissions reductions before the end of the decade. A focus on near-term reductions is key to limiting the harms that come with warming above 1.5°C.'
Time of India
3 hours ago
- Time of India
Can AI quicken the pace of math discovery?
Artificial intelligence can write a poem in the style of Walt Whitman, provide dating advice and suggest the best way to cook an artichoke. But when it comes to mathematics , large language models like OpenAI's immensely popular ChatGPT have sometimes stumbled over basic problems. Some see this as an inherent limitation of the technology, especially when it comes to complex reasoning. A new initiative from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency seeks to account for that shortfall by enlisting researchers in finding ways to conduct high-level mathematics research with an AI "co-author." The goal of the new grant-making program, Exponentiating Mathematics, is to speed up the pace of progress in pure (as opposed to applied) math -- and, in doing so, to turn AI into a superlative mathematician. 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Near a bank of chairs, a glass display shows a prosthetic arm that can be controlled by the wearer's brain signals. "By improving mathematics, we're also understanding how AI works better," said Alondra Nelson, who served as a top science adviser in President Joe Biden's administration and is a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. "So I think it's kind of a virtuous cycle of understanding." She suggested that, down the road, math-adept AI could enhance cryptography and aid in space exploration. Live Events Started after World War II to compete with the Soviet Union in the space race, DARPA is most famous for fostering the research that led to the creation of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet we use today. At the agency's small gift store, which is not accessible to the public, one can buy replicas of a cocktail napkin on which someone sketched out the rudimentary state of computer networks in 1969. DARPA later funded the research that gave rise to drones and Apple's digital assistant, Siri. But it is also responsible for the development of Agent Orange, the potent defoliant used to devastating effect during the Vietnam War. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories "I'm sure this isn't 100% innocent," Andrew Granville, a mathematician at the University of Montreal, said of DARPA's math initiative, although he emphasized that he was only speculating about eventual outcomes. DARPA is, after all, part of the Pentagon , even if it has traditionally operated with enviable independence. The U.S. military is rapidly incorporating AI into its operations, with the aim of not losing out to China and its People's Liberation Army or to Russia, which has been testing out new technologies on the battlefield in Ukraine. At the same time, Granville praised the endeavour, which comes as the Trump administration is cutting funding for scientific research. "We are in disastrous times for U.S. science," Granville said. "I'm very pleased that DARPA is able to funnel money to academia." A surfer and skateboarder in his free time, Shafto, 49, sat in a sparse conference room one recent afternoon, imagining a future when AI would be as good at solving multistep problems as it is at trying to glean meaning from huge troves of texts, which it does through the use of probability theory. Despite the unseasonably raw weather, Shafto seemed dressed for the beach in a blue-and-white Hawaiian-style shirt, white flannel trousers and sandals, with a trilby hat on the table before him. His vibe was, on the whole, decidedly closer to that of Santa Cruz than of Capitol Hill, largely in keeping with DARPA's traditional disregard for the capital's slow, bureaucratic pace. (The agency sets priorities and funds outside scientists but does not do research on its own; academics like Shafto spend an average of four years as program managers.) "There are great mathematicians who work on age-old problems," Shafto said. "That's not the kind of thing that I'm particularly interested in." Instead, he wanted the discipline to move more quickly by using AI to save time. "Problems in mathematics take decades or centuries, sometimes, to solve," he said in a recent presentation at DARPA's headquarters on the Exponentiating Mathematics project, which is accepting applications through mid-July. He then shared a slide showing that, in terms of the number of papers published, math had stagnated during the last century while life and technical sciences had exploded. In case the point wasn't clear, the slide's heading drove it home: "Math is sloooowwww." The kind of pure math Shafto wants to accelerate tends to be "sloooowwww" because it is not seeking numerical solutions to concrete problems, the way applied mathematics does. Instead, pure math is the heady domain of visionary theoreticians who make audacious observations about how the world works, which are promptly scrutinized (and sometimes torn apart) by their peers. "Proof is king," Granville said. Math proofs consist of multiple building blocks called lemmas, minor theorems employed to prove bigger ones. Whether each Jenga tower of lemmas can maintain integrity in the face of intense scrutiny is precisely what makes pure math such a "long and laborious process," acknowledged Bryna R. Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern University. "All of math builds on previous math, so you can't really prove new things if you don't understand how to prove the old things," she said. "To be a research mathematician, the current practice is that you go through every step, you prove every single detail." Lean, a software-based proof assistant, can speed up the process, but Granville said it was "annoying, because it has its own protocols and language," requiring programming expertise. "We need to have a much better way of communication," he added. Could artificial intelligence save the day? That's the hope, according to Shafto. An AI model that could reliably check proofs would save enormous amounts of time, freeing mathematicians to be more creative. "The constancy of math coincides with the fact that we practice math more or less the same: still people standing at a chalkboard," Shafto said. "It's hard not to draw the correlation and say, 'Well, you know, maybe if we had better tools, that would change progress.'" AI would benefit, too, Shafto and others believe. Large language models like ChatGPT can scour the digitized storehouses of human knowledge to produce a half-convincing college essay on the Russian Revolution. But thinking through the many intricate steps of a mathematical problem remains elusive. "I think we'll learn a lot about what the capabilities of various AI protocols are from how well we can get them to generate material that's of interest," said Jordan S. Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is part of a team applying for an Exponentiating Mathematics grant. "We have no intuition yet about which problems are going to be hard and which problems are easy. We need to learn that." One of the more disconcerting truths about artificial intelligence is that we do not entirely understand how it works. "This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology," Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, wrote in a recent essay. Ellenberg somewhat downplayed that assertion, pointing out that electricity was widely used before its properties were fully understood. Then again, with some AI experts worrying that artificial intelligence could destroy the world, any clarity into its operations tends to be welcome. Nelson, the former White House adviser, acknowledged "legitimate" concerns about the rapid pace at which artificial intelligence is being integrated into seemingly every sector of society. All the more reason, she argued, to have DARPA on the case. "There's a much higher benchmark that needs to be reached than whether or not your chatbot is hallucinating if you ask it a question about Shakespeare," she said. "The stakes are much higher."
Time of India
6 hours ago
- Time of India
The summer solstice is here. What to know about the longest day of the year
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