Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
When the Earth passes through some debris left by a comet, a meteor shower is produced like this one, which is called the Leonid shower, named after the constellation, Leo (the lion).
I know that was a simulation of an extreme and very VERY unlikely event (thank goodness), but it could be reality one day.
Right now as you watch this, there are teams of scientists looking for merteors/asteroids that are at least 150m across, these are known as Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs). It is one of these that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs as they could not cope with the low temperatures caused by all of the dust and ash thrown up by the meteor.
There would be armegedon, a cataclysm, the end of the world as we know it, no more iPods, houses, trees, cars, people, Imagine living then, what it would be like. Here is a video to visualise what it would be like.
This crater was formed roughly 50,000 years ago when a 30-meter-wide, iron-rich meteor weighing 100,000 tons struck the Arizona desert at an estimated 20 kilometers per second. The resulting explosion exceeded the combined force of today's worldwide nuclear arsenals and created a 1.1-kilometer-wide, 200-meter-deep crater.
Meteors are bits of rock flying through space, that happen to enter the Earth's atmosphere. A 'shooting star' is the meteor burning up.
NEOs or near earth objects are asteroids or meteors that the Earth is at risk of being struck by in the future. Their orbit is affected by the gravitational fields of the larger planets like Jupiter and Uranus, this means that they are on a potential collision course with the Earth.
In reality there isn't probably a great risk from these NEOs but there is a risk nontheless. If we spotted an NEO that was going to collide with Earth in the next 10 years then we could send a rocket or missile to change its orbit. But if it was only a year away then we couldn't do much at all and we would be probably be wiped out, not good.
Your own chance of dying in a large cosmic impact is 1 in 40,000, not because it is likely but because it would kill so many people, compare it to these: