Asteroid 496860 (1999 XL136) will rocket past our home world at a speed 30 times faster than a jet fighter during the first week of 2022.
It will be traveling at a speed of around 37,500 miles per hour. That's around 30 times as fast as a jet fighter and around 18 times as fast as a bullet fired from a rifle.
The reason for this large difference in size estimates is a result of how astronomers calculate the sizes of asteroids.To calculate the diameters of asteroids researchers use something called albedo, a measure of the visible light fromThere can be a large uncertainty in size that arises from this technique because size isn't the only determining factor in how much light an asteroid reflects and the albedo depends highly on how reflective the surface of an asteroid is.
This means that using this technique, from millions of miles away, a large dark asteroid can appear the same size as a small, light one.
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