Planetologists from Colombia calculated the likelihood of falling asteroids throughout the Earth and came to the conclusion that such a threat least of all threatens the equatorial countries of Africa, Asia and America, and most of all - the north of Russia and Europe, according to an article posted in the electronic library arXiv.org
In the past few decades, scientists around the world have been actively monitoring near-Earth asteroids and conducting a kind of space "census" of celestial bodies, trying to understand how dangerous they are for humanity. There are so many of them in near-Earth space that astronomers had to create special scales to assess the likelihood of their fall to Earth.
To date, the most popular and used are two such scales - Palermo and Turin, created within the walls of MIT and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Both of them take into account the likelihood of an asteroid falling and the force of its explosion, but do not show what the consequences of its "landing" will be.
“Over the last century, mankind has witnessed the fall of two large meteorites at once - Chelyabinsk and Tunguska. Unlike other cataclysms of this kind, which probably occurred in earlier historical eras, these celestial bodies exploded not over the sea, but over land, and hundreds of people were watching them, many of whom were even victims of explosions. What's most interesting is that their epicenters are only 2,300 kilometers apart,”says one of the authors of the work, Jorge Zuluaga, from the University of Antioquia in Medellin (Colombia).
According to Suluaga, the small distance between the points of impact of the Tunguska and Chelyabinsk meteorites, by cosmic standards, made him think not only about the frequency of large meteorites falling and their consequences, but also about which places on the Earth's surface are more susceptible to such a hazard.
The earth, as the scientist notes, is not the only inhabitant of the solar system - it is surrounded by other planets and many small and large asteroids distributed in space in a completely random way. For this reason, "guests from space" will more often visit those corners of the Earth that are now "looking" at the already known places of accumulation of small celestial bodies.
Guided by this idea, Suluaga and his colleague Mario Sucerquia created an unusual computer model of the solar system, in which the role of asteroids was played by a kind of "light rays" moving from the Earth towards the clusters of real celestial bodies, and not vice versa. Such an approach, as the astronomer notes, made it possible to significantly speed up the calculations and carry them out on a relatively modest supercomputer.
Using a similar model, Suserkiya and Suluaga calculated how often asteroids the size of the Tunguska or Chelyabinsk meteorite should fall to Earth and identified the most dangerous and safest areas on its surface.
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In general, as scientists note, such cataclysms will least of all threaten the equatorial and tropical regions of the planet and more often affect the polar and temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. On the other hand, the position of the "centers of meteorite danger" will shift over time, due to which every region of the planet, in principle, can become a victim of the cosmic stone.
Interestingly, these calculations show that neither the Chelyabinsk meteorite, nor its Tunguska "cousin" were in such an "epicenter" at the moment when they fell to Earth. This suggests that the small distance between their points of impact was a coincidence, and not a pattern, as Suluaga originally suspected, and that large asteroid falls do not necessarily occur where the likelihood of such a catastrophe is highest at a given time.