Regular readers know that Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is one of my favorite web comics. This morning, he had an astronomy-themed bit of snark:
I’ve blocked out the woman’s reply, so you’ll have to click through to see the punch line.
And I love Zach, the artist, I really do, but…
SPOILER for the joke:
Meteorites are after they hit the ground. Meteors are when they are still in the air and glowing, and the solid part is called a meteoroid. There is no semantic definition of when a meteoroid is is big enough to be called an asteroid, but given the size depicted in the cartoon, I’d say that one counts.
See? This is why you shouldn’t date an astronomer. Unless you like that sort of thing. Oh baby! Talk cosmic to me!
Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Brian Carroll who tweeted the link to Rebecca at Skepchick, who is in turn technically correct in her title since I’m married and Mrs. BA can kick anyone else’s asteroid herself.
I am just now hearing about an asteroid estimated to be about 10 meters across blowing up over Indonesia on October 8. Apparently no one was injured. I have no clue how I missed this, but The Telegraph has the story. This is not an everyday occurrence, but 10 meter rocks probably do come in and explode high over the Earth’s surface every few years or so. If they’re rock they won’t make it to the ground; instead they blow up due to the incredible force of their passage through the air (in this case, the explosive yield was about 50 kilotons of TNT). Smaller rocks will rain down, though.
If it’s metal, that would be worse. It might withstand the aerodynamic pressure and hit intact. However, like I said, this is pretty rare.
The newspaper article above plays up the "What if it were just a bit bigger?" aspect, which is true enough, but what can we do? A rock or chunk of metal 30 or so meters across is dangerous, sure, but is too small to see very far out, so there’s not much we can do about it. That’s not exactly great news. It’s possible it might get spotted a day or two in advance — we’ve seen smaller ones with a day’s warning — but most likely our first warning would be the flash in the sky.
It would cost a fortune, hundreds of millions or more, to set up telescopes to scan the sky deeply and quickly enough to see all these rocks. There are some ’scopes like that in the works, but I suspect the political will to create the network needed just isn’t there. It may take a few more impacts like the one over Indonesia before people start taking this seriously.
The California Literary Review asked me to answer some questions pertaining to Chapter 1 of my book, Death from the Skies!, where I talk about asteroid impacts. They’ve posted my replies on their site.
This is such a broad and interesting topic, and it’s really hard to boil down the important stuff to just a few dozen words. I tend to be a bit, um, wordy, so sometimes I have a hard time saying my name in a few dozen words, but I hope that the Q&A gives you a sense of what’s going on.
