Neil deGrasse Tyson issues strong warning on 'city-destroying' asteroid that could hit Earth in seven years
Gerrard Kaonga
Featured Image Credit: Gary Gershoff/Getty Images
In case you missed it, there may be a major asteroid strike on our planet in a few years and Neil deGrasse Tyson has now shared his own warning about it.
Space is a massive place filled all manner of wonders... and also 'city-destroying' asteroids.
While this would normally just be a fascinating phenomena for scientists to study, the latest revelation about this one particular space rock has recently put NASA on alert.
The newly discovered asteroid - dubbed '2024 YR4' - has a chance of colliding with Earth in 2032.
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To make things worse, nine countries have been named which are at the greatest risk of the asteroid potentially touching down there - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.
If not actually touching down, astronomers believe 2024 YR4 could create a mid-air explosion as it enters our atmosphere. The crash site is predicted to be as destructive as eight million tons of TNT and would damage everything within a 30-mile radius.
Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson took to Twitter on Saturday (February 15) to weigh in on the news.
He wrote: “At the moment, mansion-sized Asteroid 2024-YR4 has a one-in-fifty chance of hitting Earth in the next eight years.
“Now might be a bad time to reduce spending on Science. Just sayin.”
Other estimates have put it the possibility of it occurring at one in 43 chance will collide with Earth in 2032... so there is that.
As you can imagine, Tyson's warning hasn't exactly gone down well with social media users.
One Twitter user commented: “I noticed you used the '1 in 50' rather than the 2% to describe the odds. Which sounds more ominous? As better & more observations are done the 2% will be lowered just as with every other object in the past. Scare tactics don't work.”
Another said: “Personally, I think there is a lot of taxpayer-funded science that should be reviewed & potentially reduced, but planetary defense against NEO threats seems disproportionately underfunded relative to the likelihood and magnitude of the associated risks & consequences.”
While a third person commented: “Now if only there was a billionaire genius that was spearheading a renaissance in rocketry and trying to make humanity multiplanetary. Oh, wait, there is. Elon Musk and SpaceX.”
A blog post on the subject by NASA reads: “As more observations of the asteroid’s orbit are obtained, its impact probability will become better known. It is possible that asteroid 2024 YR4 will be ruled out as an impact hazard, as has happened with many other objects that have previously appeared on NASA’s asteroid risk list, maintained by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.”
The space agency has also stressed the asteroid hitting Earth remains an 'extremely low possibility'.