Although we have always thought that if there was danger that something would fall on our heads would be asteroids, a team of astronomers from the University of Buckingham and Armagh Observatory have warned that the real danger comes from a few peculiar objects located in the outer Solar System and that have been observed during the last two decades.
These giant objects are called Centaurs, since they seem to be a mixture of asteroids and comets (like the mythological Centaur half man, half horse), move in unstable trajectories while crossing the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Obviously, the gravitational pulls to which they are subjected by these gaseous giants cause their orbits to be altered and that, from time to time, they enforce the path to Earth.
The Centaurs have a typical size of 50 to 100 km and a single body has more mass than the set of all the asteroids that cross the Earth's orbit discovered to date. According to the calculations made by this team of astronomers, one of these Centaurs goes towards the Earth once every 40,000-100,000 years, although the problem is not that it is going to hit us; It is something much worse. When it is close to the Sun it disintegrates, creating a cloud of dust and solid debris and flooding the inner Solar System with debris that makes the impact of some of them with our planet inevitable.
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