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Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
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A Tunguska sized event is reckoned to happen around twice a century. Although not that big, you wouldn't want to be under it. Certainly a city smasher if not a planet killer.
Fortunately, very little of the planet is populated, so such events are unlikely to cause significant damage.
A METEOR streaked across the sky and exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb, its sonic blasts shattering countless windows and injuring about 1,100 people.
http://www.news.com.au/world/meteor...-injuring-people/story-fndir2ev-1226578976770
http://www.news.com.au/world/meteor...-injuring-people/story-fndir2ev-1226578976770
I think that estimate is quite exaggerated; the Tunguska event was quite powerful (it not only destroyed around 2000 sq. km worth of forest, but also set fire to the central portions); AFAIK no similar events have been recorded roughly every 50 years down the 5000 years of recorded human history.
Admittedly, humanity's ability to monitor the earth and sky has been spotty to say the least for much of that time period, but still, we should have noticed many more such events if they were in fact that frequent.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
There are a *lot* of craters all over the planet, many of them under the oceans, but still detectable despite the effects of erosion.
The last two significant ones were Tunisia and Tunguska. Before that you're looking at population and global monitoring of the 1800's. As the earth is still mostly empty of humans or covered by oceans, it's quite possible there are simply no reliable records or sightings before that and we wouldn't have "simply noticed" these events. Do you think the Native Americans of the 1300's or Australian Aboriginals of 500BC would have logged and passed on these things even if they had been in the right place at the right time?
That's a pretty major exaggeration. The blasts were sonic booms.
cbc.ca said:
There's a video here
Most of the injuries and damage was from the sonic booms, but there does appear to be a significant explosion.
Yes, but my understanding is that the explosion was high enough and weak enough that it really didn't hurt anybody. The sonic booms from the multiple fragments of the meteor after the explosion were the main problem.
Anyway, I think Phil Plait has about the best info on the meteorite:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/02/15/breaking_huge_meteor_explodes_over_russia.html
And a followup here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr..._fragment_may_have_fallen_in_frozen_lake.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/02/15/breaking_huge_meteor_explodes_over_russia.html
And a followup here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr..._fragment_may_have_fallen_in_frozen_lake.html
gamervivek
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UniversalTruth
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I would not be so sure.
Yesterday again a big one called 2013 ET with diameter around 140 m missed us at approximately 950k km from Earth.
The sad thing is that according to NASA:
"This, for example, is two to two and a half times the distance to the Moon, but in Universe scale it is too close. Worst thing is that we do not know where those asteroids come from," said Patrick Paolucci, President of the Office for astronomical observations at NASA.
It was discovered a week ago, which is very late for an asteroid of this size - but even at that we should be able to respond against it had it been on target. We have the ability to deflect these out of the way and we'd probably be suprised at how fast a response was formulated to get something up there.
No. A few years warning is absolutely necessary to deflect a large asteroid headed for Earth. There are no technologies on Earth that could possibly deflect a large asteroid in a couple of weeks.
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