{"id":222385,"date":"2025-09-24T03:43:41","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T08:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/invisible-asteroids-near-venus-may-threaten-earth-in-the-future"},"modified":"2025-09-24T03:43:41","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T08:43:41","slug":"invisible-asteroids-near-venus-may-threaten-earth-in-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/invisible-asteroids-near-venus-may-threaten-earth-in-the-future","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Invisible\u2019 asteroids near Venus may threaten Earth in the future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/invisible-asteroids-near-venus-may-threaten-earth-in-the-future.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An international study led by researchers at S\u00e3o Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil has identified a little-known but potentially significant threat: Asteroids that share Venus\u2019s orbit and may completely escape current observational campaigns because of their position in the sky. These objects have not yet been observed, but they could strike Earth within a few thousand years. Their impacts could devastate large cities.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur study shows that there\u2019s a population of potentially dangerous asteroids that we can\u2019t detect with current telescopes. These objects orbit the sun, but aren\u2019t part of the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. Instead, they\u2019re much closer, in resonance with Venus. But they\u2019re so difficult to observe that they remain invisible, even though they may pose a real risk of collision with our planet in the distant future,\u201d astronomer Valerio Carruba, a professor at the UNESP School of Engineering at the Guaratinguet\u00e1 campus (FEG-UNESP) and first author of the study, told Ag\u00eancia FAPESP.<\/p>\n<p>The study is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aanda.org\/component\/article?access=doi&doi=10.1051\/0004-6361\/202554320\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal <i>Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics<\/i>. The work combined analytical modeling and long-term <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/numerical+simulations\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">numerical simulations<\/a> to track the dynamics of these objects and assess their potential to come dangerously close to Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An international study led by researchers at S\u00e3o Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil has identified a little-known but potentially significant threat: Asteroids that share Venus\u2019s orbit and may completely escape current observational campaigns because of their position in the sky. These objects have not yet been observed, but they could strike Earth within a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asteroid-comet-impacts","category-existential-risks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}