© NASA/Don Davis
An artist's illustration depicts a massive asteroid impact on earth.
Discussions about "death from above" scenarios usually center on asteroids, but a comet impact could be far more devastating than a space rock strike.
Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) have Earth-like orbits, so their collisions with Earth tend to be glancing blows from behind or from the side. But comets travel around the sun in more random paths and can thus slam into the planet head-on, with potentially catastrophic results, researchers say.
"It would be a much bigger explosion, a much bigger crater, much more damage," impact expert Mark Boslough, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said on June 5. He made the comment during a webcast produced by the online Slooh community observatory, which previewed the June 8 Earth flyby of the asteroid 2014 HQ124.
In fact, comets can be traveling up to three times faster than NEAs relative to Earth at the time of impact, Boslough added. The energy released by a cosmic collision increases as the square of the incoming object's speed, so a comet could pack nine times more destructive power than an
asteroid of the same mass.
The speed of
comets also means that a dangerous one could be nearly upon Earth by the time scientists detect it.
Comment:
There are reports showing earth is not the only planet that is slowing down, other planets are too.
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