Venus is concealing at least three city-killer asteroids that could strike Earth in weeks without warning, potentially wreaking havoc upon our planet before we can react.
“Twenty co-orbital asteroids [space rocks in the orbit of two celestial bodies] of Venus are currently known,” the authors warned in the arockcalyptic study, which was published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics.”
The international research team, led by Valerio Carruba of São Paulo University in Brazil, wrote that at least three of the asteroids — 2020 SB, 524522 and 2020 CL1 — that circle the sun in tandem with our twin planet have unstable orbits that take them dangerously close to Earth, the Daily Mail reported.
If this shaky trajectory is shifted only slightly by a small gravitational change or other force, the asteroids could be set on a collision course with our planet, per the study.
“Co-orbital status protects these asteroids from close approaches to Venus, but it does not protect them from encountering Earth,” the researchers warned, according to the Daily Galaxy.
Carruba & Co. came to this conclusion by using imitation space rocks to simulate a range of possible outcomes over 36,000 years, finding that there is a sizable