is there anything for us to worry about - astronomy wise - this yeah? no asteroids, GRBs, blackholes, etc etc?
sorry if this has been asked before, i'm just a 12 year old kid with a lot of anxiety about space...
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answers:
poldi2 say: Nothing to worry about this year astronomy wise.
If you are that anxious, a little studying would help alleviate the anxiety.
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ngc7331 say: all of these apocalyptic disasters are very real. however, the probability of any these events occurring with dire consequences to Earth is very very low. The largest concern astronomers face are asteroids. These rocks are dark, moving very fast and many are within the gravitational influence of Earth (meaning Earth can pull them in if they get close enough). Unfortunately, there are more people working at your local McDonald's than professional astronomers commissioned to look for Earth Intersecting Asteroids.
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Clive say: Nothing has for the last 12 years, has it? And you're too young to be on this site.
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Jeffrey K say: There is nothing to worry about. No large asteroid or gamma ray burst or nearby supernova has happened in billions of years. There is no reason to think anything big will happen any time soon.
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Ronald 7 say: No
It is all under control
We would be the first ones to hear about it
And it is much more dangerous to cross the road
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Nyx say: Just worry about the stuff that really can harm you. And they are all here on Earth.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/article...
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Paula say: There ate no worries predicted for this year.
Or any year in this century.
It has been a long time since anything in space harmed the earth.
And if anything does show up, it will be the top news story on TV.
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Petter say: There is nothing to worry about, compaired to all the dangers here on earth. Heck, one minute in traffic is probably a thousand times more dangerous than a century in space.
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KennyB say: While space is scary, we have very little to fear from the stuff that is out there. Simplistically, we are a very small rock in a very big universe and the odds of something happening to us that would be catastrophic are vanishingly small.
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Head in the clouds say: No worries about anything on your list. Just take cover from those gamma rays.
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Davros say: The chances of objects in space harming you in life are very small.
GRBs are so rare that it is likely that one has never affected the Earth, and the odds are steeply against one affecting the Earth for the remainder of it's existence. There are no Black Holes in our neighbourhood so they pose zero risk to us, now or ever.
Governments need to be mindful of "space weather" (like coronal mass ejections from the sun) as it can damage satellites and in severe cases could disrupt national power grids. However they aren't a threat to people in any biological sense.
Also governments need to be aware of the risks posed by asteroids. Not so much the big ones like the one that erased the dinosaurs as they're relatively easy to spot and we'd see that coming years, if not decades in advance. They're only likely to come knocking every several hundred million years anyway.
The worrying ones are those small enough to evade tracking, but still large enough to cause significant damage to a town if it were to get a direct hit. They're rare too, but we're not all that sure to what degree.
This is not really a concern for an individual because there is absolutely nothing you could do about it if you were caught out by a meteorite impact, but more because the chances of you being hit by one, or caught in it's blast radius are hundreds of billions to one. Far less than the risk of you suddenly dying sat in your own home!
In fact in the previous several hundred years, not one single reported death has been attributed to meteorite impact.
FAR, FAR, FAR more dangerous to you than either of these is just the Sun, being its ordinary everyday self.
NEVER stare at it. It can burn permanent damage into your eyes and potentially blind you if you do. People do stare at it of course, every year people get admitted to clinics around the world with retinal damage from looking at the sun because, basically, people are bloody stupid.
And do not expose your skin to more sunlight than you need to. The UV light shining down on us is a known and dangerous cause of skin cancer, and it can be one of the absolute worst cancers you can get. Find a melanoma on your skin, and you shouldn't bother wasting money on a years subscription to Netflix if you know what I'm saying. Always wear sunblock and don't spend time trying to get a tan, especially if your skin is fair and doubly so if you live in a hot climate - like Australia which has the dubious title of skin cancer capital of the world.
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CarolOklaNola say: No, other than an NEO that we have Not found yet like the bus sized boulder that impacted Chelyabinsk Russia in 2013. Check the spaceweather.com page near the bottom of the page there is a list OG NEOs for about weeks.
NEO - Near Earth Object
The closest black hole is 1200 light years from Earth. Black how's do not suck.
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