Latest news with #YR2024
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The Discovery Telescope, operated by the Lowell Observatory, uncovers mysteries of the universe
The Brief The Discovery Telescope is one of the largest in the country. It is located in Happy Jack, about 50 miles away from the Lowell Observatory. The telescope has been instrumental in discovering eco-planets, supernovas and monitoring the path of asteroid YR 2024. HAPPY JACK, Ariz. - Tucked away in Happy Jack a very important telescope is hard at work nearly every night, not just on science but on keeping us safe from asteroids, too. When this telescope first started taking pictures of the night sky in 2012, it was renowned for its versatility. It proved that point in 2025 as it joined the front lines of planetary defense. What we know Beyond a half-mile dirt road up a hill in Happy Jack sits a structure hard to miss. The building, with angles reflecting sunlight throughout the day, inside is one of the largest telescopes in the country. "They call us the Swiss Army knife of telescopes," said Jake Tiegs who works on the Lowell Discovery Telescope. It's the Lowell Observatory's largest telescope and is actually 50 miles to the south in Happy Jack. Tiegs is one of the mechanics that helps keep it operational. "They have about a mile of power cords, communication cords, fiber optics," said Tiegs. From the only climate-controlled room in the building, he monitors the weather conditions to make sure the doors can be open. "If the wind gusts go too high, we close it up. It's a wind closure, we call it," he said. Once they are closed, he tracks which astronomers across the world have access to point it and makes sure the 6,000-pound mirror is perfectly in shape. Dig deeper Jake opened the flaps on the mirror and lowered it down for us to take a look. Under the telescope, you can see the thin 4.3 meter, 14-foot diameter mirror inside and the mechanisms that constantly shift and adjust to make sure the telescope doesn't move even the slightest. "We're talking in the neighborhood of tens of thousands of an inch or thousands of an inch," said Tiegs about the shifting mechanisms. The telescope is actually separate from the building to make sure it doesn't shake and rotates on a 14-foot diameter drive gear. "It is one piece of metal lithed in Italy, the only place that has a lithe big enough, apparently," said Tiegs. Why you should care What makes the Discovery Telescope unique are the mechanisms on its backside. In just five minutes, they can use a different tool to measure something else in the night sky on other telescopes that can take a day to swap that out. "No one is mass-producing instruments like that. Each instrument you see on a research telescope is bespoke, one of a kind, usually a prototype," said Tiegs. It was helpful as the telescope switched from searching for eco-planets and supernovas to asteroid YR 2024 and monitoring its path. The Discovery Telescope gave key data which lowered the chances of an impact with earth in the next decade substantially, all thanks to its versatility. After showing it off… it's time to cover the mirrors, tilt it back up and ready it for the next adventure, uncovering the mysteries of the universe from right here in Arizona. One of the reasons the spot in Happy Jack was picked for telescope is that weather is cooperative more than 300 nights a year.
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Don't Freak Out, But the Chances of That City Killer Asteroid Hitting Earth Just Ticked Up Again
The potential city-killer asteroid that could strike our planet in 2032 is looking more foreboding by the week. Spotted just after Christmas, the initial odds of the skyscraper-sized space rock, dubbed 2024 YR4, smashing into Earth was put at roughly 1.2 percent, or a 1 in 83 chance. Then it was upgraded to 2.1 percent, or 1-in-48, last week. And now, the latest analysis from NASA has raised the odds yet again. The likelihood of a collision is currently estimated to be 3.1 percent, or about a 1-in-32 chance, according to figures from NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies — nearly three times the initial prediction. These are still slim odds, but they don't feel slim enough. With estimates putting it between 130 and 330 feet in length — a pretty broad range, underscoring how little we know about the asteroid at the moment — YR 2024's impact could potentially unleash an explosion 500 times as powerful as the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, per Wired, at the upper end of the size range. And based on the asteroid's current trajectory, the "risk corridor" illustrating where the object could crash stretches across the Pacific Ocean, with countries ranging from Ecuador to India lying in its damage path. This extent of the carnage assumes that 2024 YR4 is as large as it appears — and doesn't plunk into the ocean (where it could still cause a formidable wave), which makes up nearly three-fourths of the Earth's surface. At any rate, these visions of city-wide destruction may be extremely premature, even if the odds of planetfall have increased. "Just because it's gone up in the last week, doesn't mean that it's going to continue to do that," Hugh Lewis, an astronomer at the UK's University of Southampton, told New Scientist. The asteroid is still only ranked at 3 on the 11-point Torino Impact Hazard scale, meaning that it's big enough — and will pass close enough — to warrant our attention, but is by no means a guaranteed hit. The numbers we're seeing now may simply represent temporary fluctuations. "No one should be concerned that the impact probability is rising. This is the behavior our team expected," Paul Chodas, director of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, told The Associated Press. "To be clear, we expect the impact probability to drop to zero at some point." The window for observing 2024 YR4 will close in April, when it flies behind the Sun. It won't reappear until 2028, at which point we'll hopefully have a far better picture of where it's going to end up. In the meantime, astronomers hope to use the James Webb Space Telescope and other powerful observatories to glean as much data on the asteroid as possible before it performs its solar disappearing act. "That will help us determine what we need to do about it, because if it's a stony asteroid, that's very different from a high proportion of iron-metal asteroid," Lewis told New Scientist. An iron-heavy asteroid would cause more damage, because it wouldn't break apart on impact, he explained. "The mass makes a huge difference in terms of the energy and whether or not the atmosphere has an effect on it." More on space rocks: Video Shows Meteorite Smashing Ground Right Where Man Had Been Standing
