Asteroids and Comets: The real threat to a possible end of the world!

Asteroids and comets are very much a real threat to Earth's existence. Unlike prophecies, they have a distinct history with Earth and all of the other planets in the solar system. It has happened many times in the past and it happens on periodic occasions now, but in smaller magnitudes, such as meteor showers.

Comets are balls of rocks and ice which have long elliptical orbits around the sun. They form a distinct feature known as the tail, when the comet reaches closer to the sun, the gases and ice melt to form the coma and leave a trail which is visible as the tail. There are short-period events, such as Halley's comets, which appear about every 76 years and normally come from the Kuiper belt. The long-term events that come from the Oort Cloud and have an orbit of about a hundred to thousands of years. Human-kinds first witness accounting of how damaging a comet's collision was the Shoemaker-Levy 9 event that impacted Jupiter. The first of 21 impacts from Shoemaker-Levy 9 created a spot on Jupiter that was the size of the Earth. Jupiter was bombarded for a total of 6 days. Each impact was equivalent to about 6 million megatons of energy.

Should we worry? Absolutely, but don't go building a bomb shelter just yet.

If there is ever an end of world scenario that is closer to reality, then these are it. More so with asteroids, just because of the sheer numbers and close proximity to Earth. As you can recall, I had mentioned that a rock just 6 miles wide collided with Earth in the past and is the accepted evidence (for many) that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and many of the life forms on Earth. The destruction that a rock just a mile wide can create is almost unimaginable. Let's put that into perspective, a rock a mile wide travelling at over 30000 mph (70000 kph), on impact will have about 10 million times the energy released compared to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Cancel your 3PM appointment because you're fried. That's right fried (not fired)...because you're cooked. If you manage to survive the initial blast wave and you don't get killed by the debris that was initially hurled into the atmosphere and is now returning back to Earth, prepare to starve because so much debris and dust will engulf the Earth causing many of the plant and animal life to die off due to the lack of sunlight. Lack of sunlight will also mean very cold days and nights. I hope you have a good supply of Twinkies, water, and a very warm blanket...lol.

So now, what makes them so dangerous? It's just plain old physics and a little bit of that E=mc2. An object in motion, stays in motion unless acted on by another force. This simply states that a rock that is travelling in excess of 30000 mph (70000 kph) will continue at that speed until something stops it...say maybe like...Earth?

Well...what happens after that is the law of conservation of mass and energy. That energy of the collision has to go somewhere. I think Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 explains it well. Mass (m) is a manifestation of Energy (E) with speed of light squared (c) as a constant. So in basic terms it means for a given mass of the rock, upon impact, all that mass will be consumed and transferred in the form of energy that was proportional to the rock's speed. That correclates to millions of megatons of energy released. I think we can look at that as a bad hair day for many of us.

Near Earth Objects (NEO) colliding with Earth are a probability, but as it stands right now, there are no known objects that will have that chance unless something changes the gravitational orbit around "the belt" within the next couple of years. I don't believe a 2012 apocalypse is possible from a direct impact from asteroids or comets.

Cheers!

Jason

To return to Cosmic Events from Asteroids and Comets, click here.

To return to End Of Days Apocalypse from Asteroids and Comets, click here.