Check out www.spaceweather.com for the details, but a 30 foot (10 meter) asteroid smacked into Asia, and detonated mid-air with the force of several A-bombs, touching off nuclear explosion detectors all over the map, and causing widespread panic.
They’re out there.
This one fortunately broke up before it hit anything. Dunno precisely why it blew, but I’d figure its own bowshock finally took it apart as it densified the already densifying air.
Well, that’s a bit unsettling. Even more so when you consider that the Russians supposedly never bothered to switch off their Dr. Strangelove-esque doomsday machine. Good to know that the atmosphere is still hardy enough to blow up most nefarious wayward space rocks before they do any damage, though.
Good job. Bruce Willis wouldn’t have had time to pull his socks on.
SpaceWeather.com is one of my favorite sites to check every few days: fascinating details on this asteroid. They mention that the sensors run by the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty organization picked up the explosion, which is good. That astronomers didn’t know it was coming is, no fault to the astronomers, worrisome if you like to worry about accidental annihilation from space (which I don’t particularly fret over). SpaceWeather.com is also great for checking on sunspot activity. We’ve finally got a decent one forming on the sun.
Oh, and if you like astronomy stuff, the other, absolutely fantastic website to check every few days is NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. I apparently get my link from a server in Antwerp. I believe NASA has several sites hosting APOD:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
That’s at Goddard (GSFC), in Maryland.
In 1908 an asteroid of about the same size exploded in midair over
Tunguska,Russia. It leveled 80 million trees over an area of 800
square miles and killed an unknown number of native persons in the
area. The explosion was 1,000 times more powerful than Big Boy,
the bomb released on Hiroshima. I think that we have had the most incredible luck so far!!
Wow! Sure wish they had put this in the news — I would have enjoyed vast weirdness on my birthday. Tunguska may have been a factor of where in the atomsphere it broke up and whether or not it was a comet may have been a factor — but this is just a guess on my part. I’m sure there are others of you out there with way more info and understanding of all this.
But you have to feel sorry for poor old Indonesia; they have got to be feeling picked on by the cosmic powers-that-be, what with eathquakes, volcanos, tsunamis and now rocks with attitude.
Several of my friends track these incoming rocks from space, and bags were being packed to head to Indonesia until it was confirmed nothing had made it to the ground. There was some disappointment in the meteorite collecting world.
Wow indeed! I am kind of a (headline) news junkie and had heard/seen nothing of this until I read it here……I think this blog has the most widespread group of members I have read yet. What else are we missing?The mind boggles.
CJ and Raesan thanks for the links…astropix is gorgeous.
Just heard that the recession is over…..isn’t that special? 😉
I agree, Smartcat. We read. And we sf folk are curious, as a group. On the average, we’re probably the sorts that will compulsively read the back of the cereal box at breakfast. Based on one experience with an sf crowd—when presented individual lighted ice sculptures at a very, very, very fancy restaurant, we all waited politely until the waiter had left and then flipped the sculptures in a race to find out what the light source was. Other tablefuls of diners in evening dress were busy being cool and blase and impressing one another over the fancy dinner. Not us. We weren’t going to enjoy that dinner until we knew how the light got into the ice.
If you want to keep up with science news, this is a really good site. http://www.sciencedaily.com/
we’re probably the sorts that will compulsively read the back of the cereal box at breakfast.
Doesn’t everybody? The most out-there thing I’ve read was a Russian dictionary. I don’t speak Russian, and have forgotten too much of the alphabet. It was either that or sit around bored. (I’ve also had reason to use this event in a book review, as in, ‘I would rather read-‘)
So how did they light the ice sculptures? I’m guessing some sort of battery tea light.
We make ice lanterns in the dead of winter by filling a bucket with water and putting a smaller form inside (has to be weighted a little)…let freeze overnight…if it goes above freezing during the day it’s easy to release the forms….otherwise a heat gun or hair dryer will do the trick….at dusk put a candle in the ice bucket et voila! Also pretty to make a ring of icicles in the snow……hey, have to do something to make the dark of winter interesting!
😆 I knew somebody would ask. Hollow space inside an ice swan, and in those days, a nine volt battery and a flashlight bulb.
With no off switch. We had a chuckle imagining the walk-in fridge in this fancy kitchen with scores of swans sitting there glowing in the dark at each other.
Some poor bloke had the job of hooking up all the swans. And the restaurant had a lot of ‘tables of ten.’
*taps a code into his phone, causing the gravity lance to retract back into the top of Mt. Hood…whistles innocently until no one’s looking…then pumps his fist a few times*
In all seriousness, though, I don’t always find relying on statistical probability to “protect” me from being beaned by space rocks to be very reassuring. As a bike commuter, I have a much higher chance of being snuffed by a cranio-rectally-inverted driver than by an asteroid (and in fact just got nerfed off my bike last Friday). But somehow I don’t worry about that much. Not sufficiently apocalyptic, I guess…
Science Daily = a distinct lack of study time. Alas, I had to let it go from my feed reading, for just that reason.
I trust you to provide me the science news of import. 😉
It’s a very, very cool fact. Unfortunately, unless you have serious space technology, it would be far too much coincidence for a novel.