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For Asteroid-Hunting Astronomers, Nathan Myhrvold Says the Sky Is Falling

By Lee Billings

Nathan Myhrvold—wealthy former Microsoft technologist, current patent tycoon, classically trained chef, bestselling author, prize-winning photographer, PhD-holding physicist and gleeful scientific gadfly—has a new obsession: killer asteroids, or rather the researchers he suspects of botching their study.

Astronomers have found more than 14,000 potentially hazardous “near-Earth objects” (NEOs) that buzz our planet with alarming regularity, and estimate that hundreds of thousands more await discovery. Much of what we know about NEOs comes from a single spacecraft, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and its offshoot NEOWISE observing program. But according to a new 110-page paper Myhrvold has submitted to the journal Icarus, much of the NEOWISE catalogue is flat-out wrong. The NEOWISE team, he maintains, has wildly miscalculated the sizes and masses of many asteroids. Because bigger rocks make bigger booms when they strike Earth, Myhrvold’s claims raise the chilling possibility that when and if another errant asteroid is found hurtling our way, no one will really know how dangerous it is—not even the supposed experts…

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