The danger of meteorites threatens the safety of the planet
An asteroid 6 miles (10 km) in length dealt a devastating blow to the dinosaur world about 66 million years ago, causing earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and climate disasters that soon became extinct 75% of all living things, but during all this, remained the earth itself.
Does this mean that our planet is immune to the force of asteroids? If the dreaded asteroid that killed the dinosaurs wasn’t enough to end the world, what would it take? Can a space rock destroy the entire Earth and how big is it?
According to Space, the short answer is: It might take a planet-sized rock to destroy our planet, but it would take a long time, let alone wipe out all or all life on Earth.
Brian Tun, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies asteroid impacts, points to the giant impact hypothesis, a scientific theory that proposes a Mars-sized planet called Theia collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, unleashing a barrage of rocky debris into space that merged. In the end with the moon.
Experts disagree on whether this ancient collision was a head-on or just a lightning strike, but there is no doubt that if anything was alive on Earth at the time, it would have been wiped out by the planet.
NASA considers any space rock to be a potential hazard if it is at least 460 feet (140 meters) in diameter and orbits within 4.6 million miles (7.4 million kilometers) of Earth, and according to NASA, an impact from such a rock could wipe out an entire city. It destroys the land around it.
A collision with a larger rock that is at least 0.6 miles wide “one kilometer wide,” said Gerrit L. Vershor, an astrophysicist at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, “likely to lead to the end of civilization” by unleashing global climate catastrophes. .