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This is a list of asteroids that have impacted Earth after discovery and orbit calculation that predicted the impact in advance. As of December 2024 [update] , all of the asteroids with predicted impacts were under 5 m (16 ft) in size that were discovered just hours before impact, and burned up in the atmosphere as meteors .
The asteroid's provisional designation as a minor planet, "2024 YR 4", was assigned by the Minor Planet Center when its discovery was announced on 27 December 2024. [2] 2024 indicates the discovery year, the first letter, "Y", indicates that the asteroid was discovered in the second half-month of December (16 to 31 December) of that year, and "R 4" indicates that it was the 117th provisional ...
In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported: "It's 100 percent certain we'll be hit [by a devastating asteroid], but we're not 100 percent certain when." [ 10 ] Also in 2018, physicist Stephen Hawking considered in his final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions that an asteroid collision was the biggest threat to the planet.
Most small asteroids are believed to be piles of rubble held together loosely by gravity, although the largest are probably solid. Some asteroids have moons or are co-orbiting binaries: rubble piles, moons, binaries, and scattered asteroid families are thought to be the results of collisions that disrupted a parent asteroid, or possibly a ...
Among the numbered minor planets with an unambiguous period solution are (459872) 2014 EK 24, a 60-meter sized stony NEO with a period of 352 seconds, as well as (335433) 2005 UW 163 and (60716) 2000 GD 65, two main-belt asteroids, with a diameter of 0.86 and 2.25 kilometers and a period of 1.29 and 1.95 hours, respectively (see full list).
Aten asteroids account for only about 7.4% of the known near-Earth asteroid population. [4] Many more Apollo-class asteroids are known than Aten-class asteroids, possibly because of the sampling bias. The shortest semi-major axis for any known Aten asteroid is 0.580 AU, for object 2016 XK 24. [3]
The Eunomia or Eunomian family (FIN: 502) is a large asteroid family of S-type asteroids named after the asteroid 15 Eunomia.It is the most prominent family in the intermediate asteroid belt and the 6th-largest family with nearly six thousand known members, or approximately 1.4% of all asteroids in the asteroid belt.
The Apollo asteroids are a group of near-Earth asteroids named after 1862 Apollo, discovered by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth in the 1930s. They are Earth-crossing asteroids that have an orbital semi-major axis greater than that of the Earth (a > 1 AU ) but perihelion distances less than the Earth's aphelion distance (q < 1.017 AU).