Sentences with phrase «of big asteroids»

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.

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.

But a variety of other circumstances, for example, the impact of big asteroids, can blast a lot of atmosphere away and a lot of other more subtle phenomena can happen that can also sort of draw the atmosphere away.

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

Not exact matches

What it's about: After discovering that an enormous asteroid is close to pummeling the Earth, NASA recruits a bunch of drillers to make a big hole in it and save the plane t.

Space X's new rocket called Falcon Heavy is big enough to send cargo or even people out of Earth's orbit to the moon, an asteroid or Mars.

«There was a noise like a big explosion,» G. Baskar, principal of the college in Tamil Nadu's Vellore district where the asteroid landed, told the Wall Street Journal.

To determine which theory is correct, the researchers needed to find some of the asteroid belt's original occupants to see how big they are.

From the origin of the universe (big bang), to the origin of the moon (big collision), to the origin of lunar craters (meteor strikes), to the demise of the dinosaurs (asteroid impact), to the numerous sudden downfalls of civilizations documented by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book Collapse, catastrophism is alive and well in mainstream science.

The sooner we try to deflect an asteroid (perhaps by using the gravitational pull of a spacecraft to yank it onto a new course) the easier it will be, which is why Spaceguard is trying to catalog everything big enough to be a threat.

They could be anything from tiny dust grains to big chunks of rock the size of asteroids or planets.

Most of the frogs alive today owe a big thank you to the asteroid or comet that delivered the coup de grace to the dinosaurs.

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

Vesta and Ceres are the big enchiladas of the asteroid belt, a loose collection of rubble left over from the earliest days of the solar system.

With the solar collector, we go out there and orbit the asteroid, but the whole deflection scenario has the advantage of being slow, big, fragile, and unlikely to be misused as a weapon.

Nestled in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres is a tiny loner, while Pluto — in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of the solar system — is nearly three times as big and hosts a handful of moons.

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

An asteroid that big would be about four to five times the diameter of the object that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Plus, when the asteroid bit into a big chunk of what's now the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, stuff that lived underground — and far away — clearly had a significant survival advantage.

Like the three other big outer - solar - system objects discovered in the past three years — including 560 - mile - wide Varuna, found in 2000 — Quaoar resides in the Kuiper belt, a wide swath of asteroids located past Neptune.

«We're inside of a big hole in the ground — a crater created by an asteroid 4 billion years ago — and for some reason there's a giant mountain in the middle,» Bell says.

How our planet's water arrived may be a story of big, bullying planets and ice - filled asteroids.

A new reconstruction of Antarctic ocean temperatures around the time the dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years ago supports the idea that one of the planet's biggest mass extinctions was due to the combined effects of volcanic eruptions and an asteroid impact.

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.

A new analysis by geophysicist Steven Ward and planetary scientist Erik Asphaug of the University of California, Santa Cruz, concludes that the biggest tsunami hazard arises from asteroids between 30 and a few hundred meters across, which may strike the ocean every 1000 to 100,000 years.

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.

And he expanded the scope of big history by adding to it his concept of the contingency — the rare, unexpected event (like an asteroid collision) that changes the world in a blink.

Having several smaller explosions instead of one really big blast also reduces the chances of fragmenting the asteroid, which would make it more difficult to handle, Remo adds.

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.

Countless asteroids and comets have indeed plowed into Jupiter, the solar system's biggest planet, for billions of years.

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.

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.

«Ceres is so big compared to all the other asteroids that it's really different,» said Andrew Rivkin, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. «It's sort of the penultimate step before a planet.»

Science agrees, with a big asteroid ending the age of dinosaurs, hitting near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula about 66 million years ago.

«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.

As the asteroid was gathering material up into a big ball of rock, it was also trapping the heat inside itself.»

On top of the risk of a deadly, engineered virus leaking into public spaces, there are also the environmental dangers of climate change, nuclear war, the potential of an enormous asteroid strike wiping us out, and the problem of humanity's overpopulation of the planet, just to name a few of the biggest challenges when it comes to remaining on Earth.

According to Hawking's theory, numerous tiny primordial black holes, possibly with a mass equal to that of an asteroid or less, might have been created during the big bang, a state of extremely high temperatures and density in which the universe is thought to have originated 13.8 billion years ago.

Mercury and our moon hold other clues: big craters whose ages and patterns suggest a massive storm of comets and asteroids set off by the moving planets, in a pulse lasting 100 million years or so.

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.

Its bulk would either send a small asteroid on a different trajectory, or in the case of a bigger one, it would be fitted with a nuclear weapon that would do its job (hopefully, for everyone alive at the time) with a bang.

u One of the big problems in the current story on how asteroids evolved is: «How do gas and dust in a hypothetical solar nebula condense into dense boulders (asteroids, planetesimals, and meteoroids)?»

«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.

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.

Bruce Greenwood plays a big - shot scientist who comes to the cold continent looking for the remains of an asteroid or something else out of a Michael Bay movie.

Pixar's second release of the year imagines 1) Earth never hit by a big, bad asteroid, 2) dinosaurs that never went extinct as a result, and 3) a time when their human neighbors weren't yet paving and building on every available inch of the landscape.

Armageddon was a part of one of Hollywood's notorious big - budget showdowns, losing a «race for the screen» with Paramount's competing asteroid - disaster picture Deep Impact.