How Our View of the Distant Universe Could Slowly Fade Away
C/NET
The worsening climate crisis could soon obstruct the eyes of our ground-based telescopes: "We will literally have less to look at." Toni Santana-Ros asteroid hunter.
At nightfall, after the day's final scenes of flamingo sunbeams fade to black, he peers up at the sky to watch space rocks swimming along our solar system's gravitational tides. Sometimes, he sees shards casually cruising next to Earth, greeting telescopes with a gentle "hey," never to be observed again. But occasionally, he catches one on a crash course with our delicate blue orb.
Last year, Santana-Ros, a planetary scientist at the University of Alicante in Spain, sprang into action when astronomers realized an asteroid named 2022 WJ1 was headed straight for the border of Canada and the US. With barely four hours on the clock, he mustered his team to help pinpoint how menacing this asteroid would be. What towns would it threaten? Would it be like the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub or merely make a "plop" sound before sinking into a sturdy body of water?
"Luckily," he concluded, "the object was small and just produced a spectacular fireball."