Sentences with phrase «big asteroid»

According to the study, that would ensure that Earth would be re-seeded with life, following big, cataclysmic events like the Late Heavy Bombardment which happened approximately 4 billion years ago when the space environment around the Earth was dominated by untold numbers of big asteroids in the aftermath of its formation.

The authors suggest that searches for these impact ejecta layers will be more fruitful for determining how many times Earth was hit by big asteroids than searches for large craters.

But with big asteroids, it doesn't matter much where they land.

So if we're safe from the really big asteroids, and the smaller, more frequent ones are likely to hit without major incident, what's the problem?

So Loeb and colleagues calculated just how big an asteroid, how strong a supernova, or how powerful a gamma - ray burst would have to be to inject that much energy into Earth's oceans.

«We think two big asteroids crashed into each other, creating a huge cloud of grains the size of very fine sand, which are now smashing themselves into smithereens and slowly leaking away from the star,» Huan Y.A. Meng, a graduate student at the University of Arizona at Tucson and the study's lead author, said in a statement.

The last time a big asteroid came rolling by Earth was in 2004 when 4179 Toutatis, came within about four lunar distances.

Time to push the «big asteroid» reset button I suppose.

Therefore, the Almahata Sitta rock comes from a big asteroid or early planet, the research teamsaid.

«Even the boulders that crumble off the surface of big asteroids could cause Tunguska - like events.»

June 17 brings the launch of the Dawn spacecraft, which will provide the first close look at the two biggest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres.

After lingering for almost 10 months of study, Dawn will depart for Ceres, the biggest asteroid of all.

The chances of being hit by a big asteroid or fried by a nearby star going supernova have not increased.

Although astronomer David Jewitt of the Institute for Astronomy in Hawaii thinks Rabinowitz has done a good job counting the big asteroids, he is more worried about the hundreds of thousands of rocks smaller than 1 kilometer but larger than 100 meters.

A new census has dropped the estimated number of big asteroids that could inflict massive global punishment to at most 1000, all of which could be found by the end of the decade.

The biggest asteroid belt member, and the only dwarf planet found there, is Ceres, which is about 1000 km across.

And even while the final shuttle was still in space, the first orbiter arrived between Mars and Jupiter at a big asteroid called Vesta; the Dawn spacecraft has already turned it into a little world of wonder and will move on next year to Ceres, making it the first dwarf planet to be orbited.

«With asteroids that cluster, the belief is they are pieces of what once was a big asteroid that got hit by something,» Carl Hergenrother of the University of Arizona says.

The radar results found that the bigger asteroids are covered with fine - grained dirt, the pulverized rock created by hundreds of millions of years of meteoroid impact.

The meteorite is an achondrite, a relatively rare type of space rock that comes from a planet or big asteroid — something large that generated enough internal heat early in its history to melt partially, producing a metallic core surrounded by rock.

40 min Two Cents: What if the big asteroid that k...

In Pixar's latest movie, The Good Dinosaur, the big question is: «What if the big asteroid that created the ice age never hit the Earth and dinosaurs were allowed to evolve?»

You can hover around the map with a jetpack or build a gravity generator to walk safely on the surface of bigger asteroids.