Posted on 11/09/2011 3:36:56 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Explanation: Asteroid 2005 YU55 passed by the Earth yesterday, posing no danger. The space rock, estimated to be about 400 meters across, coasted by just inside the orbit of Earth's Moon. Although the passing of smaller rocks near the Earth is not very unusual -- in fact small rocks from space strike Earth daily -- a rock this large hasn't passed this close since 1976. Were YU55 to have struck land, it might have caused a magnitude seven earthquake and left a city-sized crater. A perhaps larger danger would have occurred were YU55 to have struck the ocean and raised a large tsunami. The above radar image was taken two days ago by the Deep Space Network radio telescope in Goldstone, California, USA. YU55 was discovered only in 2005, indicating that other potentially hazardous asteroids might lurk in our Solar System currently undetected. Objects like YU55 are hard to detect because they are so faint and move so fast. However, humanity's ability to scan the sky to detect, catalog, and analyze such objects has increased notably in recent years.
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
Wow! A little jealous...
It might generate a tsunami as well, but my uneducated guess is that a lot of the energy would be expressed as vaporization of the water (and the object), leading to powerful storms, widespread blackout, and massive precipitation.
Definitely. The 1976 rock made it into a really crappy novel, I think it was called “Asteroid” (took ‘em months to come up with the title), and it wasn’t any 27 years later. So, maybe it was a different big close call. So yeah, it probably happens all the time. The smaller ones are of less concern, but it’s a bit daunting to realize that this thing is a quarter mile in diameter, and has been just missing us very few years for maybe millions of years, and wasn’t even spotted until 2005. :’)
The things that hit the Earth from time to time are probably nearly 100% nearby on a regular basis, and, like the old Spirograph toy, after enough cycles, our paths cross. A big interloper from waaaay out, or one just passing through the Solar System, could of course hit the Earth, but the odds are vanishingly small.
:’)
Bamboozled again!!! The second link leads to a pic of the asteroid Ida, and it too is captioned as if it’s 2005 YU55. Sorry, that was pretty slipshod of me.
Hmmm. That’s a toughie. Would liberals blame global warming or George Bush for that?
Wow!
LOL oh well. :)
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