The asteroids that are mostly likely to hit Earth aren't huge planet-killers, but smaller chunks of rock tens of meters wide — just big enough to wreak havoc on a city or a region. There are many more of these small asteroids, and they're more likely than their larger brethren to get nudged out of the main asteroid belt and migrate inward toward Earth. And because they're so small and hard to spot, astronomers might not see the next Chelyabinsk or Tunguska object coming until it's right on top of us.
But out in the asteroid belt, 112 million miles (180 million kilometers) away, where most of these small asteroids begin their journey toward Earth, the smallest object astronomers have been able to spot and track is about a kilometer wide.
Until now. Burdanov and his colleagues broke that record by finding a 33-foot-wide (10 m) asteroid hidden in JWST data, which was originally intended to search for atmospheres around the rocky exoplanets orbiting the nearby red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1.
Source: www.space.com
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