Summary
A 27-inch asteroid, C0WEPC5, entered Earth’s atmosphere over Siberia on Tuesday, creating a harmless but visible fireball.
This marked Earth’s fourth detected asteroid strike of the year and only the 11th “imminent impactor” ever recorded.
The asteroid was detected by the Kitt Peak National Observatory ahead of impact, showcasing advancements in asteroid detection.
Separately, a larger asteroid, 2020 XR, measuring 1,200 feet in diameter, will safely pass Earth on Wednesday at a distance of 1.37 million miles.
If we pray to it, do you think it’ll deign to hit us?
I think many of these asteroids are caused by an intergalactic alien game of ‘Road Bowling’ and aliens just drunkenly throwing asteroids as far as they can while having a laugh at the local bar.
They usually try to avoid planets with intelligent life but we recently fell below the threshold
They got us with the pog, missed us with the slammer.
(I actually have no idea how pogs work)
There’s a not so great book called The Killing Star, where aliens that are never described in the book decide for an unknown reason that we need to be destroyed, so they just hurl as many asteroids as they can at our solar system. It worked pretty well.
Not a bad “low-tech” way to destroy a rival civilization in another solar system. A good idea in an otherwise disappointing book.
You might enjoy a similar plotline in the excellent Bobiverse book series. (I don’t think it shows up until the second or maybe even third book, so don’t go in expecting that immediately.)
Arthur C. Clark “The Hammer of God”
Star Trek “The Paradise Syndrome”
Seconding this. Excellent hard science series that spends equal time on both being a nerd and being nerdy.
Just glancing at what those books are about, they sound fun and I’ll check them out, thanks. In the case of The Killing Star, that was the plot point that attracted me to it, but the execution was clumsy and the ending was not exactly a cliffhanger, but it didn’t feel like a resolution either.
When I was done reading it, my dog decided it needed to be chewed up. It was the only time she ever chewed up a book. I guess she felt even more strongly about it than I did.
Yeah, I know that kind of book you mean. It’s not a popular opinion, but I felt similarly about Annihilation (though I only read the first book of the series, so maybe things would have improved later).
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I’m from Buenos Aires and I say kill them all!
It must be Apophis! Tries to keep the peace treaty with the Asgards by making our extinction seem like a natural disaster!
Unfortunately, it’s only like 350 meters wide.
The big one that took out the dinosaurs was 10 to 15 kilometers.
A 350 meter asteroid would just make a lot of noise and make a little splash if it survived to hit the ocean, or a little hole in the ground if it managed to strike land.
We need to pray for bigger space rocks.
350m is definetely going to make a strong impact.
The Tunguska Asteroid was expected to be 50-60m in width https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
And that released 3 - 50 Megatons of energy. For reference the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had about 20 kilotons. So about a one thousands of that. The greatest man made explosion, the sowjet Tsar bomb had about 50 Megatons of energy.
A 350m asteroid has about 7 times that length and probably at least three times the diameter. So we are looking at an impact with the mass of at least 50x that, so 150 - 2500 Megatons. If that hits central Europe the immediate blast would probably kill a few hundred million people.
What if I pray for it to hit me, specifically
Hey, no hogging the roid!