• Question: what happens if the earth gets hit by an astroid?

    Asked by applepie7 to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 8 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by shreya22161999.
    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 8 Mar 2013:


      It depends on how big it is!

      There was one just a few weeks ago in Russia, check this out!

      All it did was freak some people out and break some shop windows.

      A much bigger asteroid probably wiped out the dinosaurs. I doesn’t take too much imagination to think what might happen to us humans if a similar sized on hit us.

    • Photo: Amy Tyndall

      Amy Tyndall answered on 8 Mar 2013:


      The term ‘asteroid’ actually refers to leftover bits of rock from the formation of the solar system, that orbit our Sun in a fairly stable manner (for example, we have a huge asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter). When a stray lump of rock enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it is called a ‘meteor’, and when it actually impacts, it is referred to as a ‘meteorite’.

      Earth gets hit by meteorites all of the time! But as Grant correctly says, the effect it has is highly dependent on its size when it hits the ground. Most of the time, the majority of the rock burns up in Earth’s atmosphere before it gets anywhere near the ground (which is what creates the beautiful, bright tails as they streak through the sky), and so we are pretty safe down here 🙂

      I found this really cool map that shows every known meteorite impact on Earth so far! Have a play…

      http://www.wunderground.com/news/meteorite-map-every-strike-earth-history-20130226

    • Photo: Martin Archer

      Martin Archer answered on 10 Mar 2013:


      The Russian meteor was about the size of a house, most of the damage it did was because of the shock wave you can see in the videos. It did also create a 30 ft crater in a frozen lake. This is pretty rare though as most meteors completely burn up in the atmosphere and don’t have much of an effect on us.

      If the asteroid that came later that day (2012 DA14 – catchy name) were to ever hit Earth, it could easily destroy a city but that’s about it. It’s 50 metres across.

      Certainly, much much bigger asteroids could have catastrophic effects on us like one did in the past for the dinosaurs. But we have a space program whereas they didn’t so hopefully we could either do something about it or just run away. Some scientists are looking into these ideas, though I’m pretty sure they think getting Bruce Willis up there wouldn’t be the best idea 😉

    • Photo: Shawn Domagal-Goldman

      Shawn Domagal-Goldman answered on 12 Mar 2013:


      What the others said! Depending on size, either nothing…. or total global catastrophe. We get hit by stuff from space every day, but most of it is so small it burns up in the atmosphere.

      The good news is we know where almost all the really big stuff is that would cause major problems. A lot of the objects we know about were found by amateur astronomers! Pretty cool, huh?

      The even better news is that NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency) and other groups are building the technology we would need to deflect anything that was on a collision course for Earth. So even if we find out something IS on a collision course with Earth, we will soon be able to deflect it.

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