Your death by ‘doomsday asteroid’ Bennu revealed – instant vaporisation, 100ft tsunamis and fireballs in the sky
INSTANT vaporisation is the fate for anyone that gets hit by "doomsday" asteroid Bennu – a space rock Nasa warns could smash into Earth in around 200 years.
Astrophysicists have revealed to The Sun what it would feel like for blitzed onlookers watching the 1,600-foot rock's impact from around the world.
The asteroid would hit Earth "with almost the same speed as in space – 27km/s (60,000mph)", said Dr Martin Archer.
He's a space physicist at the Queen Mary University London, and has told The Sun exactly how destructive Bennu's impact could be.
"The crater would be 5 miles wide and 2000ft deep," Dr Archer explained.
And he warned that the scale of destruction would be staggering, akin to all-out nuclear war.
Within 1 mile of the asteroid impact
For anyone within a 1-mile radius of the impact, it's game over.
"You'd probably be vaporised," said Dr Archer.
"Or at least flung into the air at immense speed."
All the experts that we spoke to agreed that it would be similar to a major nuclear attack.
You would be killed instantly – before you even knew what was happening.
"You will get little warning and will be vaporised, like sitting at ground zero of a large nuke. Nothing will survive," Dr David L Clements, of Imperial College London, told The Sun.
"If it hit London then it’s goodbye to London and everything and everyone in it, and significant damage to anything closer than Birmingham.
"The impact of Bennu hitting the Earth would be the equivalent of a very large nuclear bomb going off," he added.
Within 10 miles of the asteroid impact
The situation isn't much cheerier 10 miles away from the impact either.
The asteroid strike will create so much heat that you and everything around you will be enveloped in flames.
"You’ll be incinerated by the thermal flash from a fireball 275 times brighter than the Sun," said Dr Clements.
"Clothing, wood, trees, grass ignite and you’ll suffer third-degree burning from the flash before the ignited fires get you. It will be a firestorm.
"The blast will destroy pretty much all buildings and 90% of trees will be blown down.
He added: "The blast arrives about 50 seconds after the flash so everything will be on fire already."
Within 100 miles of the asteroid impact
What if you're 100 miles from the impact site? That's about the distance from London to Bournemouth.
Well the air will be so hot – and moving at hundreds of miles an hour – that you're still at risk from third-degree burns.
Dr Archer says you'd see a 5-mile wide fireball that looks "five times bigger than the Sun" for about a minute.
Next you'd feel a magnitude 7 earthquake around 30 seconds after impact.
After three minutes, you'd be hit by a dusting of ejected rock.
"And eight minutes later, you'd be hit by a sound about as loud as heavy traffic that could shatter windows," Dr Archer said.
And if that doesn't get you, super-heated rocks falling from space could crush you.
Or simply burn you alive.
"On its way down to Earth, the asteroid would push aside the air in front of it, effectively creating a hole in the atmosphere, leaving a partial vacuum," said Dr Robin Smith, a physicist at Sheffield Hallam University.
"Before the surrounding air can rush back in to fill the gap, material from the impact such as vaporised asteroid, material from the Earth's crust, and water (if it lands in the ocean), escapes through the hole and is sucked out towards space.
"After a couple of minutes this material will come raining down upon the Earth over a very large radius (hard to say exactly but likely on a global scale), with disastrous consequences for anyone living below."
Bennu – the key facts
Here's what you need to know
- 101955 Bennu is a large asteroid that was first discovered on September 11, 1999
- It's official designated as a "potentially hazardous object", because it could one day hit Earth
- Space scientists say it has a 1-in-2,700 change of impacting Earth between 2175 and 2199
- It's named after the Bennu, an Ancient Egyptian mythological bird associated with the Sun
- The asteroid has an approximate diameter of 1,614 feet
- Bennu is the target of the ongoing Osiris-Rex mission, which is designed to return samples from the asteroid to Earth in 2023
- The Osiris-Rex spacecraft arrived at Bennu on December 3, 2018 – following a two-year journey
- It will map out Bennu's surface and orbit the asteroid to calculate its mass
- An asteroid of Bennu's size can be expected to hit Earth approximately once every 100,000 to 130,000 years
- Bennu will make a close approach (460,000 miles) to Earth on September 23, 2060
Within 3,000 miles of the asteroid impact
So it's raining rock and the sun is blocked out globally...but that's not all.
"If the asteroid hits the ocean, a tsunami would be produced," said Dr Smith.
This wave would be 100 foot high at 50 miles from impact, and 23 feet high 500 miles away.
Even worse, the height of these waves would increase as they reached shallow shorelines, causing widespread destruction to coastal regions.
And remember those falling rocks? They're dropping all over the world, and are roasting hot.
As they plunge from the sky, they're cooked by the atmosphere.
This will start fires all over the world, putting "billions of tonnes of soot into the air and block out the sunlight", Dr Smith explained.
"Lack of sunlight would stop plants from growing, thus collapsing the food chain," he added.
Is there any hope?
The good news is that although Bennu could hit us, it's unlikely.
"The possibility of Bennu hitting Earth is very low (1 in 3000), and if it does, it will be in 150-200 years time," said Dr Smith.
And by then, it's possible that we'll have put into place a sci-fi asteroid-blasting weapon to save us from certain doom.
Someone get Elon Musk on the line...
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A lost planet in Solar System was gobbled up by Jupiter billions of years ago.
And, here's a full list of the asteroids that could crash into Earth.
Are you terrified by the prospect of a doomsday asteroid hitting Earth? Let us know in the comments!
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