Hello and welcome to an emergency bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast.

Nobody Panic.

Yeah, with me, science journalist Izzy Clark, producer Richard Hollingham and resident expert Dr. Robert Massey, the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Do you want more of the alarm?

Yes, I do, obviously.

So Becky's away in the sunshine at the moment.

And this podcast was inspired by a message from Marcus on email,

which simply reads,

Asteroid 2024 YR4 emergency pod, followed by emojis of an asteroid.

Yeah, I mean, I sort of opened that quite late at night.

I was like, I think this needs to happen. So Asteroid 2024 YR4 is an asteroid with the potential to hit Earth.

It's astronomy news that everyone is talking about.

So Robert, what do we know about this asteroid?

Yeah, I mean, the first thing to say is that it's one of Melly, right?

And there are an awful lot like this that cross or come close to the orbit of the earth and thereby the earth as well but this particular one is it takes about four years to go around the sun

it's similar in size this is where you you can probably get your panic button going but i'm going

going to try and carve things down similar in size to the object that caused the tunguska event in

Siberian 1908 that flattened a bit of a Siberian

forest and meteor crater in Arizona, which is obviously, you know, on the tourist trail in a big way,

roughly a mass are maybe 200,000 tonnes, 40 to 90 metres across. And we think it's stony rather

than iron dominated, and that's just based on the light that's been analysed from it so far.

The uncertainties are just because it's too small to resolve. It's not big. It's sort of, you know, imagine, could be as small as a bus, could be a lot bigger. But in a telescope, it just looks like a dot. So you have to estimate its size and looking at its brightness and trying to deduce it from that. That's you know, but that's what we know about it so far.

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