“Can nuclear weapons protect Earth from a dangerous asteroid?”

Scientists have conducted a new experiment to explore how Earth could be protected from the threat of a large asteroid coming from space. An asteroid roughly the size of a football field could potentially destroy an entire major city. Using powerful computer simulations, scientists have tried to determine whether a nuclear explosion could be used as a last line of defense if a large asteroid were heading toward Earth.

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, led by Isaiah Senti Steven and his team, used supercomputers to study what might happen if a one-megaton nuclear explosion were detonated near a 160-meter-wide rocky asteroid. The researchers found that the nuclear device would not necessarily have to strike the asteroid directly. An explosion occurring several meters above the surface could also be effective.

Around 80 to 70 percent of the energy released by a nuclear explosion comes out in the form of X-rays. These extremely hot rays heat the asteroid's surface so intensely that some of its material vaporizes and is blown away. As this material is ejected, it changes the asteroid's speed and direction, while the internal shockwave causes the rock to break apart.

To understand this process more clearly, the scientists created three different computer models. They used data from an asteroid recently studied by a mission from NASA to model the asteroid's structure and shape. They also incorporated information from fragments of two real meteorites.

In the first experiment, the explosion was carried out 10 meters away from the asteroid. The simulation showed that 98 percent of the asteroid was severely affected, with most of its material breaking apart and spreading in different directions. In the second experiment, the explosion was conducted 25 meters away. Although the greater distance reduced the direct impact, the researchers found that the radiation spread over a larger area and caused greater damage to the asteroid during the initial moments.

However, the scientists say that the study also has some limitations. The computer simulations were so complex that analyzing just one-thousandth of a second required 1,680 computer processors to run continuously for 59 days. As a result, it was not yet possible to determine what would happen to the asteroid's fragments over the long term. The fragments could disperse through space and become harmless, but they could also potentially come back together because of gravity, or a large fragment could still end up heading toward Earth.

This research is part of ongoing efforts in the field of planetary defense. Scientists are already working on methods that could potentially change the trajectory of dangerous asteroids before they reach Earth. Rather than being a standard solution, a nuclear explosion is considered an extreme emergency and last-resort option.

The key question remains: if a large asteroid were actually heading toward Earth, how much time would we have to stop it? This new research is helping scientists better understand what options might be available in an extremely dangerous situation.