Tom Earnshaw
A humungous asteroid worth £8,000,000,000,000,000,000 has taken the attention of NASA, with the deep space object having the potential to make everybody on Earth a billionaire.
At more than 220 kilometres across, the huge chunk of rock is worth roughly £8 quintillion. Which is obviously an absolutely insane amount of money.
It's because the object is full of incredibly useful materials that, back on Earth, could help humanity in all kinds of ways.
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We're talking platinum and palladium, which are essential to the production of cars and electronic goods.
Now US space agency NASA has used Elon Musk's SpaceX to probe the asteroid, which is called 16 Psyche after being first discovered back in 1852 by Italian astronomer, Annibale de Gasparis.
Using SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, it sent its Psyche spacecraft in the direction of the asteroid back in October 2023.
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It is now well on its way, having travelled a year through space.
The Psyche spacecraft will not reach 16 Psyche until August 2029, with it 391 million kilometres from Earth. And even then, it is only orbiting, rather than landing.
But in doing this, the hope is that it will be able to fully understand what the asteroid is made of, with it thought to be made up of somewhere between 30 percent and 60 percent of metal.
With the asteroid worth a reported £8,000,000,000,000,000,000, and the human population sitting at around 8.025 billion people, every person could get the equivalent of just under £1 billion each.
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If we're talking specifics, it would be around £996,884,735 per person.
Obviously, it's highly unlikely that is how the wealth of the asteroid would be distributed.
Instead, it would probably ruin the world economy after sending the free market in to free fall due to the added overnight value to international markets.
For NASA, the focus is not money. Instead, they believe the asteroid will help them gain a greater understanding of the universe and its properties, as well as planetary cores.
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Some scientists have hypothesised that the asteroid is the exposed core of something that is called a planetesimal; an early planetary building block that was stripped of its outer layers by violent collisions.
Others believe it could be the result of a geological process known as ‘ferro-volcanism', a type of eruption that involves the eruption of liquid metal.
Whatever it is, we're not likely to get the final scientific findings from the Psyche spacecraft until the early 2030s.