We’ll rock ya
15 OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD ASTEROID BELTERS
★ TODAY is Asteroid Day – officially the most rocking date in the calendar! Co-founded by astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May, the annual event aims to raise awareness of the dangers posed by mighty space rocks hitting the Earth.
★ It marks the anniversary of the Tunguska explosion in Russia on June 30, 1908, when a 600ft object burst over remote Siberia flattening 80million trees.
Here JAMES MOORE has come up with 15 asteroid facts to blow your mind…
1 Asteroids are big chunks of mineral and rock left over from the birth of our solar system 4.6billion years ago. There are millions of them in space, mostly between Jupiter and Mars in the so-called Asteroid Belt. Most asteroids orbit 2 the Sun and they come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from a few feet to hundreds of miles. Asteroids differ from 3 comets, which are made of dust and ice. Examples include Halley’s Comet, which can be seen from Earth every 75 years. Meteoroids are smaller 4 bits of mineral and rock that have broken off asteroids. A meteor is an object that turns into a fireball as it enters our atmosphere.
A meteorite is 5 any one of these bits of space junk that make it to the Earth’s surface.
The largest intact one, in Namibia, weighs 60 tons.
Each year 100 tons 6 of material enters the Earth’s atmosphere daily, but most burns up.
In 2013 a 66ft meteor 7 hit Chelyabinsk in Russia, the largest object to enter our atmosphere since the Tunguska event, injuring 1,000 people. The dinosaurs 8 were probably wiped out 65million years ago by the effects of a 50-mile wide asteroid hitting Earth. It left the massive Chicxulub crater in Mexico.
The name asteroid, 9 meaning star-shaped in Greek, was coined by British astronomer William Herschel in 1802, a year after Italian Giuseppe Piazzi found the first and largest known one, Ceres. Its diameter measures 600 miles. 10 Stars such as the late Freddie Mercury, George Clooney and Sandra Bullock have asteroids named after them.
11 Asteroids can travel at speeds of 45,000mph and NASA tracks around 20,000 “near-earth objects”. Around 2,000 are reckoned to be potentially hazardous.
12 There’s a very small chance that one called JF1, the size of an Egyptian pyramid, could hit the Earth on May 6, 2022, with the force of 15 Hiroshima bombs. If a 60-mile wide asteroid hit, it would probably wipe out humanity. 13 Most pass within thousands of miles of Earth, but a football pitchsized asteroid collides with us every 2,000 years, with the power to obliterate a city the size of New York. 14 The asteroid threat inspired movies such as Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis, who leads a team to blow one up with a nuclear missile. Scientists now say deflecting one might be a better bet. 15 Experts say it’s only a matter of time before a devastating asteroid strike and the late Professor Stephen Hawking, inset, reckoned it was the biggest threat to the planet. Interestingly, the word asteroids is an anagram of O! Disaster.