An asteroid measuring roughly 65.6ft (20m) in diameter struck Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast in 2013, causing widespread damage. The rogue space rock did not hit the Earth directly but instead exploded in the atmosphere and released a powerful shockwave. The asteroid’s shockwave damaged more than 7,000 buildings and injured more than 1,000 people with shards of broken window glass. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and science author Dr Natalie Starkey have revealed what would have happened if the asteroid hit London instead.
Dr Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and the host of the popular science podcast StarTalk.
The StarTalk podcast has more than 715,000 followers on YouTube, more than 809,000 followers on SoundCloud and is available on iTunes.
On July 25, Dr Starkey appeared on the podcast to discuss all asteroid-related matters, in an episode dubbed Cosmic Queries – Asteroids and Comets.
When asked about the threat posed by Earth-bound space rocks, Dr Starkey said it “would be quite an issue” if a rock like the one in Chelyabinsk hit London.
The asteroid expert said: “We had an event in Russia back in 2013, it was called Chelyabinsk, and it was about a 20m asteroid.
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“So it was fairly large, I guess kind of like a double-decker bus, and that didn’t actually kill anybody but it caused quite a lot of damage in the region and it had this big sonic boom as it came through the atmosphere.
“It actually blew windows and everything in Chelyabinsk town and we didn’t know it was coming cause it was quite small. We didn’t see it, we didn’t spot it before it arrived.
“So yes, they happen and if that had hit central London – I’m pretty close to central London – that’s 60 miles across maybe if you take Greater London into account.
“Actually that would be quite an issue if that had landed in the centre of London, so it’s sort of lucky that most of the planet is empty and a lot of these asteroids tend to land in the ocean so we don’t see them and they don’t cause any harm.”
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The scientist, however, stressed, asteroid strikes to do occur “all the time”.
The good news is the bigger the space rocks, the less frequently they hit.
According to US space agency NASA, a car-sized asteroid will strike somewhere on the planet around once a year.
These space rocks are most likely to erupt into flame in the atmosphere and disintegrate before they hit the ground.
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Larger space rocks that “threaten Earth’s civilisation” only tend to strike once every few millions of years.
NASA said: “Impact craters on Earth the Moon and other planetary bodies are evidence of these occurrences”.
Any rock smaller than 82ft (25m) across will most likely burn up without touching the ground.
But as the 2013 Chelyabinsk incident shows, asteroids do not have to strike the ground to cause widespread damage.