There are at least 14 thousand asteroids in near space that have not yet been discovered and pose a potential danger to Earth, and each of them could destroy an entire city and kill millions of people. NASA experts came to this conclusion. The report was published in the official gazette Web site American space agency.
According to the report, scientists already know about the existence of approximately 32 thousand asteroids in near-Earth space that could hit our planet under certain conditions. More than 10.5 thousand of them are over 140 meters in diameter. The fall of a space rock of this size would cause great destruction. For comparison, the meteorite that exploded in Chelyabinsk in 2013 was only 20 meters in diameter.
According to astronomers, there should be almost one and a half times more dangerously large asteroids, but they have not yet been discovered. In addition, there are still nearly 50 unknown asteroids with a diameter of up to 1 kilometer that threaten all humanity.
Finding asteroids is complicated by the fact that these objects do not emit their own light, so they can only be found when the Sun illuminates them. To solve this problem, observatories specially designed to observe such celestial objects are being opened all over the world.
Earlier astronomers discovered More than 500 thousand undiscovered stars in the Milky Way galaxy.