scientists have spelled out exactly how an asteroid could kill the people unlucky enough to be caught underneath one if — or when — when it smashes into Earth.

AN ASTEROID is said to have wiped out the dinosaurs but a massive space rock could trigger the extinction of humanity too.

Now scientists have spelled out exactly how an asteroid could kill the people unlucky enough to be caught underneath one if — or when — it smashes into Earth.

Aussie hero Steven Howarth is trying to save us all from asteroidal impact — which is a good thing because they have a surprisingly large number of ways to kill us.

Researchers from the University of Southampton in the UK have set out seven different risks posed by an asteroid collision.

They published a rather ominous paper discussing “asteroid impact effects and their immediate hazards for human populations” on the same day an asteroid the size of the Rock of Gibraltar zoomed uncomfortably close to Earth.

The team used computer simulations to assess the risk posed by 50,000 different sizes of asteroid.

Their study found that asteroids caused much more death and destruction if they smashed into the ground or exploded in the sky above a land mass in an “airburst”, rather than crashing into the sea and causing a tsunami.

“The analysis of average casualty numbers per impactor [asteroid] shows that there is a significant difference in expected loss for airburst and surface impacts and that the average impact over land is an order of magnitude more dangerous than one over water,” the team wrote.

As you’d expect, the researchers also found that larger asteroids pose more of a risk than smaller ones.

However, space rocks which were smaller than about 40 metres in diameter were more likely to explode in an airburst, posing a different kind of risk to the people below.

They set out seven different ways in which space rocks could cause “loss of life”, which we’ve listed below.

Picture: NASA/JPL-CaltechSource:Supplied

WIND BLAST

The wind generated when an asteroid smashes into Earth or blows up in an airburst is the “most critical impact effect”.

Any gusts caused by an asteroid impact are likely to be so severe that they “dislocate bodies and objects to cause harm”.

The wind caused by a large space rock would tear humans limb by limb and knock buildings down on top of them.

An asteroid needs to be just 18 metres wide to cause casualties in this manner, the researchers found.

OVERPRESSURE

This is the scientific term for the shockwave caused when an asteroid explodes in the air or crashes into the ground or sea.

It was this effect which caused injuries when a meteor exploded in the sky over the Russian town of Chelyabinsk.

The researchers wrote: “Most of the damage and injuries during that event were caused by the aerodynamic shock that knocked people to the ground and damaged structures and windows, causing indirect injuries by flying glass shards.”

Overpressure can also “rupture internal organs”.

If the asteroid is large enough, the overpressure would effectively pulp victims’ insides.

THERMAL RADIATION

If an asteroid hits our planet, it will cause a massive fireball.

The effects of this are likely to be devastating to anyone caught out in the open when impact occurs.

If the asteroids hits a city or explodes above it, buildings are likely to be set on fire — with larger asteroids causing fireballs which are miles wide.

While humans would be able to shelter from the fireballs caused by smaller space rocks by sheltering in basements, the risks posed by a larger object are so great that cities would have to be evacuated if there was a risk of asteroid impact.

Thought to be the result of an asteroid impact in the heart of Australia, just west of Alice Springs, the edges of this crater have been eroded over time. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied

CRATERING

When an object hits a planet, it usually causes a massive crater.

Sometimes the force is so great that the asteroid instantaneously melts away.

However, the risk is likely to be quite small unless you’re unlucky enough to be in the exact area where the crater has formed.

But by the time cratering occurred, you’d probably have been blown to smithereens by the overpressure or incinerated in a fireball.

EJECTA

The process of cratering is likely to throw up a huge amount of rocks and debris into the air.

Some of these fragments are likely to be red hot, meaning they could start further fires even after a fireball had died down.

Others will be very heavy, meaning they would squash anyone in their way.

However, both ejecta and cratering are considered to be low risk because humans would have already been killed by the other effects of an asteroid impact.

If the object is large enough, however, it would send material flying into the air which could block out the sun.

If this material lingered in the atmosphere for long enough it would cause plants to die and would slowly starve everything on Earth.

TSUNAMI

If an asteroid plunged into the ocean, it would inevitably trigger a massive wave.

This has the potential to kill people who are far away enough from the asteroid to be safe from the fireball and overpressure.

But a tsunami wave takes quite a long time to spread across a large ocean, giving people the chance to save themselves by scrambling to higher land.

“Tsunamis can only reach near-coastal populations because their inland reach is limited to a few kilometres,” the researchers added.

They found that tsunamis are less of a risk than previously thought.

New Yorkers run for their lives as a tsunami floods the streets of New York City in ‘The Day After Tomorrow’.Source:AP

SEISMIC SHAKING

An asteroid impact would likely cause an earthquake.

But quakes are only considered to only have a “minor effect” on the number of casualties.

The asteroid is unlikely to cause the same sort of devastation caused by the sort of natural disasters humans are familiar with.

If you’re far away enough from the asteroid that you don’t have to worry about being burned alive or blown to bits, you probably don’t have to worry about earthquakes shaking your house down on top of you.

This article originally appeared in The Sun.

Slides of an asteroid dubbed ‘The Rock’ that has come perilously close to Earth. Picture: NASA/AFP

NASA has released stunning images of a massive asteroid that has flown perilously close to Earth.

The peanut-shaped asteroid dubbed 2014-JO25, nicknamed ‘The Rock’, is 1300m across and streaked past the earth last night giving astronomers a rare chance to check out a big space rock up close.

It hurtled past at around 117,482km/h just over 1.6 million km away — uncomfortably close in astronomical terms.

It came closest to Earth at 10.20pm AEST last night

REVEALED: NASA discovers ‘seven Earths’

Slides of an asteroid dubbed ‘The Rock’ that has come perilously close to Earth. Picture: NASA/AFPSource:AFP

NASA announced on Wednesday two discovery missions it plans to launch in 2021 and 2023. Lucy, the first mission, will explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, while the second, called Psyche, will focus on a unique metal asteroid. Photo: NASA- SwRI and SSL/Peter Rubin

It is a binary asteroid, which means it is made of two rocks that were originally separate bodies. Astronomers believe the asteroid could even be bigger than the Rock of Gibraltar which is 426m high.

No other asteroid of comparable size has come this close to the Earth in the past 13 years.

The impact of the asteroid hitting the Earth would unleash as much energy as about 1000 atomic bombs the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

It would completely destroy a city the size of London or New York and cause extensive damage for hundreds of kilometres.

Scientists first learned of ‘The Rock’ three years ago when it was spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey, a US program that uses two telescopes in Arizona to detect potentially dangerous near-Earth objects (NEOs).

While not big enough to cause an extinction level event, the effect of an object the size of ‘The Rock’ hitting the Earth could be catastrophic on a regional scale.

Scientists at the University of Colorado have calculated it would take a 97km-wide object to obliterate the human race.

Astronomers believe they know about 90 per cent of potentially hazardous asteroids bigger than 1000m across.

Smaller objects that are still large enough to cause a huge amount of destruction are a more worrying problem.

Only 30 per cent of 140m-sized NEOs have been detected and less than 1 per cent of those in the 30m range.

Even a 30m-wide asteroid could cause significant damage. The asteroid that is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was between 10km and 13km across.

We obtained radar images of an asteroid that will safely fly by Earth tomorrow. Learn more: https://t.co/LX36CeU5ac pic.twitter.com/9EC72CfZYt

— NASA (@NASA) April 19, 2017

The Earth’s last close shave with an asteroid came in September 2004.

The 5km wide asteroid Toutatis came within 1.55 million km — just over four lunar distances — of the Earth.

REVEALED: NASA’s ‘Night Lights’ breakthrough

The asteroid Toutatis came within four lunar distances of the Earth in 2004.Source:News Corp Australia

Robotic telescope service Slooh, which allows people to view space through a telescope online, is tracking the asteroid.

A Slooh spokesman said: ‘The Rock’s close approach … is an alarming reminder of just how close these destructive chunks of space debris come to Earth.’

As the planet becomes more crowded, eyes are rising to the stars. The colonisation of space is no longer science fiction, it’s big business, from NASA to entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. Frans von der Dunk is a space lawyer, and one of the few people in the world trying to bring some order to the space race.

The rock is now hurtling away from the centre of our solar system, said Ian Carnelli, an astronomer from the European Space Agency (ESA).

“It does not represent a danger to our planet,” Carnelli told AFP.

The Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico — which has one of the world’s biggest radio telescopes — captured the 2014 JO25’s first images, showing an object that is likely “two large asteroids that fused together”.

2014-JO25 is approximately as big as the Rock of Gibraltar. Picture: GettySource:Getty Images

THE THREAT ASTEROIDS POSE

You may not see them, but space rocks whiz above our heads all the time.

Patrick Michel, an astronomer at the Cote d’Azur Observatory, estimates that an average of 10,000 to 100,000 tons of spatial material come into our general neighbourhood each year.

But large asteroids passing this close to Earth remain a rarity.

“The next one will pass by in 2027, an 800m long object that will come within one Earth-to-the-Moon distance,” he said.

The last time 2014-JO25 was in our vicinity was 400 years ago, and its next close encounter with Earth won’t happen until sometime after 2600.

2014-JO25 falls within the category of “potentially hazardous asteroids” that astronomers monitor for safety, Pascal Descamps, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory told AFP by phone.

Any space rock at least one kilometre across that travels within 7 million kilometres of Earth qualifies.

The good news is that scientists have identified at least 90 per cent of these flying hazards within our solar system.

The impact of ‘The Rock’ asteroid hitting the Earth would unleash as much energy as about 1000 atomic bombs the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Picture: The AdvertiserSource:The Advertiser

“There isn’t a single one that threatens us in the short term, meaning in the next few centuries,” Michel said.

“There are thousands of asteroids larger than one kilometre,” he added.

“The frequency with which they could hit us is once every 500,000 years, so we are facing a risk that is very low.”

Many sizeable asteroids have crashed into Earth or exploded in our atmosphere, leaving behind massive craters — and clues as to their composition.

Once seen as the least glamorous objects in the solar system, it now looks like asteroids could hold clues to how the Earth was formed, how life began and ultimately, how it will end.

More than 60,000 years ago, a 30m rock crashed into what is today Arizona.

And 65 million years ago, an even bigger asteroid slammed into Earth a little further south, leading to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs.

The asteroid that is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was between 10km and 13km across. Picture: AFPSource:AFP

To prevent such a catastrophe, a team of astronomers from NASA and the European Space Agency have drawn up plans for a live test in space: deviating a potentially deadly asteroid.

A self-guided 400-kilo satellite — hurtling at six kilometres per second — would target an approaching asteroid.

The objective would not be to destroy the object, but to deflect it, since fragments could then crash into Earth. A target has been selected.

So far, however, funding has not been approved.

NASA images show Asteroid 2004 BL86 flying past Earth with its own Moon following close behind. Courtesy: NASA

Once seen as the least glamorous objects in the solar system, it now looks like asteroids could hold clues to how the Earth was formed, how life began and ultimately, how it will end.

… and the truck that he wants to put it on. Source: Supplied

Steven Howarth doesn’t ask for much. All he wants is to save humanity from instant extinction.

And he reckons that for about $200,000 he can do it.

Mr Howarth wants to build Australia’s first mobile observatory so he can drive around the country looking for asteroids that are about to hit Earth.

And so, like anyone else these days, he’s started an online crowd-funding campaign.

However, it would appear humankind’s hope for survival hangs very much in the balance. It has so far raised only $100.

Mr Howarth’s not-for-profit organisation “Earth Shield Program” aims to purchase a giant space telescope and place it on the back of a Mercedes Unimog truck, thereupon to roam the outback looking for any rogue rocks that might be headed our way.

An asteroid could get as close as just 11,000 miles from the Earth surface when it passes by our planet on March 5. WSJ’s Monika Auger reports. Photo: NASA

Ouch! What an asteroid might look like if it hits Earth.Source:The Advertiser

And while it’s fair to say his methods are unconventional — he is yet to get a meeting with a government minister and the CSIRO won’t return his calls — the idea is actually not as crazy as it sounds.

As news.com.au memorably reported this week: “You probably slept through it, but we were all nearly pulverised by a huge asteroid nicknamed ‘The Rock’ that hurtled perilously close to Earth last night.”

The 1.3km wide object swung past at around 117,482km/h just over 1.6 million km away, which in astronomical terms is a little too close for comfort.

Had it hit, it would have had the impact of 1,000 atomic bombs. It’s fair to say our biggest problem would no longer have been North Korea.

It’s this sort of thing that started keeping Mr Howarth up at night and so he decided to do something about it.

“I think the more I delved into it, the more I became interested and the more I became interested the more concerned I became,” he told news.com.au.

What is little known is that it is often amateur astronomers who spot these things, and Australia is extremely well placed for asteroid spotting.

A NASA image of asteroid 2014 JO25 which came within 1.6 million kilometres of Earth this week. Picture: AFP/NASASource:AFP

“We’re in the best part of the world to locate these objects,” Mr Howarth tells news.com.au.

“The ones who normally spot these objects are the smaller telescopes. They have a better view of these objects passing us than deep space telescopes.

“Amateur astronomers around the world are actually finding these objects and passing this information on.”

The telescope that Steven Howarth’s Earth Shield Program wants to buy …Source:Supplied

… and the truck that he wants to put it on. Source: SuppliedSource:Supplied

Once picked up, Mr Howarth said any object hurtling towards Earth could potentially be deflected by “gravitational shockwave displacement”, which would involve detonating a missile at the right point to knock it off course.

It is unclear precisely how this would work in practice, nor how advanced this technology is, and Mr Howarth admits it would certainly be very expensive.

However, as he points out: “It doesn’t take much for a country to be crippled by one of these things. So doing nothing about it is going to cost you a lot more than doing something about it.”

Australian National University astrophysicist Brad Tucker said it would require a rather large telescope and ongoing funding to make the project viable, and he didn’t see why it had to move around. However he was delighted by Mr Howarth’s enthusiasm.

“One thing Australia does not do is fund a Near-Earth Object program to search for asteroids. The one we had going, the Uppsala Survey at Siding Spring, which was funded by NASA, had its funding cut. Therefore, it is awesome to see the public trying to make up for the slack,” he told news.com.au.

“The problem is that to find the asteroids we need to find, the small to medium-sized ones between 5 and 100 metres, we need a large telescope (about 1-1.2 metres), wide field of view and, more importantly, funding to keep it running.”

Aside from saving the planet from asteroids, Mr Howarth also hopes the Earth Shield Program will be able to visit remote schools and get kids excited about astronomy and space — as he most certainly is.

And while Mr Howarth has had little luck with ministers, he says has gauged interest from several Lord Mayors.

“Including Hobart,” he adds.

Scientists are finding potentially life-bearing planets at a surprisingly high rate, but the latest may be more tantalizing than most. A research team has discovered LHS 1140b, a temperate rocky exoplanet orbiting the habitable zone of a tiny star 40 light years away. While it’s not the first such planet found relatively nearby, it’s an ideal candidate for study — since it transits in front of its host, astronomers could look for water and oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere by watching how it filters starlight. The star itself also doesn’t emit much high-energy radiation, so there’s a greater chance of life than you might see around stars like TRAPPIST-1.

The problem with imaging a black hole is that, by definition, they don’t emit light or radiation. Luckily, large black holes are usually next to other stars and suck away their matter, something astronomers can see. “As [gases from stars] fall towards the black hole, it becomes hotter and hotter and begins to emit radiation. This is a good source of light: the accretion rings shine and illuminate the central black hole,” writes Luminet in his e-Luminesciences blog.

The distinguishing feature of a black hole is its “event horizon” boundary, the point of no return for matter and light. At its periphery, materials sucked in from adjacent stars form an “accretion disk,” famously depicted in Interstellar (below) as two bright, perpendicular disks. That’s just an illusion, though — there’s only one disk at the equator, but the light is bent upward by the black hole’s extreme gravity (via gravitation lensing).

Luminet’s image depicts two other important phenomena not seen in Interstellar. One is the fact that the energy and light are stronger near the edge of a black hole and weaker farther out. Another is the Doppler and Einstein effects caused by the accretion disk’s rotation, which would make light appear to be brighter on one side, depending on the spin direction. In Luminet’s image, the accretion disk spins counter-clockwise, so its light approaches the viewer on the left and recedes on the right, making the left-hand side look brighter.

All that causes the black hole to be much brighter in the center and left, as depicted in Luminet’s image, but not on the “Gargantua” black hole created by Interstellar‘s effects team. “A realistic image must show a strong asymmetry of the disk’s brightness, so that one side is far brighter and the other is far dimmer,” he says. (Interstellar’s black hole expert Kip Thorne was very aware of that, but director Christopher Nolan left it out so as not to confuse the audience.)

Luminet calculated all of that back in 1979 using the IBM 7040 mainframe, an early transistor computer with punch card inputs. The machine generated isolines for his image that were “directly translatable as smooth curves using the drawing software available at the time,” he told Engadget in an email.

To create the final image though, he relied on his other passion: art. Using numerical data from the computer, he drew directly on negative image paper with black India ink, placing dots more densely where the simulation showed more light. “Next, I took the negative of my negative to get the positive, the black points becoming white and the white background becoming black.”

The result is an image that still holds up and is closer to reality than the CGI done by Interstellar’s whiz kids. What’s more, subsequent computer simulations created by NASA Goddard and others still show the same defining elements — a thin “photon ring” at the center, Doppler and Einstin-shifted light and a double accretion disk caused by gravitational lensing. Not bad for someone with just punch cards and India ink.

The agency, Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance (developer of the Atlas V rocket that will ferry Cygnus to the space station) placed four fisheye-lens cameras on the pad, around 300 feet from the rocket. Nearby, a computer protected by a blast-proof box will stitch images together in near-real time. As with any 360-degree video, you can watch it on your computer and drag it around with the mouse cursor to get the full view. If you want to feel like you’re truly witnessing a rocket roar to life up close, though, you’ll have to watch it on a VR headset.

The broadcast will start airing around 11:01AM EDT, 10 minutes before Atlas V lifts off. It will be about a minute behind, since the computer needs to process the photos, but that’s still much better than ULA’s previous 360-degree launch videos, which were uploaded way after the events ended.

We are GO for LIVE 360! ULA & @OrbitalATK with @NASA, bring you #AtlasV #OA7 tomorrow at 11amET! https://t.co/HyNJM0wYI5 pic.twitter.com/MACcL7Eyv3

— ULA (@ulalaunch) April 17, 2017