Every year many asteroids approach the Earth at a distance less than the distance to the Moon, but catastrophic collisions are extremely rare. A new study conducted by experts from Sweden’s Luleå University of Technology suggests that our planet has some kind of defence system in the form of its powerful gravitational forces, and it is this system that copes with dangerous celestial bodies.
Researchers have been looking for Earth-approaching asteroids that have been blown to pieces for years, but they have been unable to detect them. According to scientists, any fragments that form in this way blend into the background so quickly that it is simply impossible to identify the family of such asteroids.
Seven years earlier, the Swedes had developed a model that calculated the trajectories of asteroids of different sizes to determine their numbers at different distances from the Sun. They compared the results obtained by their model with observations of celestial bodies for seven years, and realised that they had undercounted some small asteroids at a distance comparable to the orbits of Earth and Venus.
