Sentences with phrase «bigger than an asteroid»

Not exact matches

Our solar system's main asteroid belt is located between Mars and Jupiter and contains more 1.1 million large asteroids (bigger than.6 miles).

«Comets travel much faster than asteroids, and some of them are very big,» Mainzer said.

If the original asteroids were bigger than about 20 kilometers across — and there's no reason to think they weren't — decaying radioactive elements inside them would have made the rock hotter than that.

As expected, the simulations showed that the larger, 1 - km asteroid created the bigger splash, throwing 42 trillion kilograms of water and vapour — enough to fill 16 million Olympic - sized swimming pools — across an area more than 1000 kilometres wide and up to hundreds of kilometres above the Earth's surface.

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.

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.

That's up to 9 kilometers per second slower than the average for bigger objects that have hit Earth over its history, says space scientist and asteroid specialist William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

He notes that Congress gave NASA a 2005 mandate to find 90 percent of the near - Earth asteroids more than 140 meters in diameter — big enough to wipe out the Eastern Seaboard or most of California.

A meteoroid is any interplanetary object bigger than a speck of dust and smaller than an asteroid.

Going from a meteoritic sample less than a centimeter in diameter to an asteroid up to a kilometer or more in diameter involves a pretty big leap.

Making the generous assumption that humans can survive multiple ice ages and deflect an inevitable asteroid or comet strike (NASA predicts that between now and then, no fewer than 10 the size of the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs will hit), the researchers forecast we will then encounter a much bigger problem: an aging sun.

If Sharpton and his team are right, it means the impact involved an object much bigger than the 10 - kilometre asteroid suggested when the crater was first discovered in 1980.

Small asteroids are much more numerous than big ones — astronomers estimate near - Earth space likely contains millions of NEAs a few yards (meters) across, nearly 16,000 NEAs between 100 and 300 yards across, and nearly 5,000 NEAs between 300 and 1,000 yards in size.

So far, surveys have discovered several thousand near - Earth objects, but astronomers estimate that as many as a million have diameters greater than 50 metres, big enough to be dangerous in a collision with Earth (see UN urged to coordinate killer asteroid defences).

Still, even though Schweickart loves the idea of a gravity tractor, he thinks most asteroids will need a bigger push than it could easily provide.

«While Ceres is a lot bigger than the candidate asteroids that NASA is working on sending humans to, many of these smaller bodies are produced by collisions with larger asteroids such as Ceres and Vesta.