Jay TateWith just a few hours’ notice, a relatively large asteroid whipped through the Earth-moon orbit over the weekend. You may have missed it though; humanity only learned of the asteroid hours before the flyby.
A “Tunguska-class” asteroid was first spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey out of the University of Arizona on April 14.
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Jay TateAbout 70,000 years ago, when the human species was already on Earth, a small reddish star approached our solar system and gravitationally disturbed comets and asteroids. Astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge have verified that the movement of some of these objects is still marked by that stellar encounter.
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Jay TateSome might say it’s paranoid to think about an asteroid hitting Earth and wiping us out. But the history of life on Earth shows at least 5 major extinctions. And at least one of them, about 65 million years ago, was caused by an asteroid.
Preparing for an asteroid strike,
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Jay TateIn popular culture, asteroids play the role of apocalyptic threat, get blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs – and offer an extraterrestrial source for mineral mining.
But for researcher Nicholas Hud, asteroids play an entirely different role: that of time capsules showing what molecules originally existed in our solar system.
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Jay TateA blinding flash, a loud sonic boom, and shattered glass everywhere. This is what the people of Chelyabinsk, Russia, experienced five years ago when an asteroid exploded over their city the morning of Feb. 15, 2013.
The house-sized asteroid entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk at over eleven miles per second and blew apart 14 miles above the ground.
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Jay TateTwo small asteroids recently discovered by astronomers at the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) near Tucson, Arizona, are safely passing by Earth within one lunar distance this week.
The first of this week’s close-approaching asteroids – discovered by CSS on Feb. 4 – is designated asteroid 2018 CC.
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Jay TateOn a ho-hum day some 12,800 years ago, the Earth had emerged from another ice age. Things were warming up, and the glaciers had retreated.
Out of nowhere, the sky was lit with fireballs. This was followed by shock waves.
Fires rushed across the landscape, and dust clogged the sky,
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Jay TateAsteroid 2002 AJ129 will make a close approach to Earth on Feb. 4, 2018 at 1:30 p.m. PST (4:30 p.m. EST / 21:30 UTC). At the time of closest approach, the asteroid will be no closer than 10 times the distance between Earth and the Moon (about 2.6 million miles,
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Jay TateAsteroid 2002 AJ129 will make its closest approach to Earth on Feb. 4, 2018, at 4:30 p.m. EST (2130 GMT). At closest approach, the asteroid will be no closer than 10 times the distance between Earth and the moon.
In recent days, a few media outlets have reported (in some cases,
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Jay TatePieces of a meteor that ripped through the sky on Tuesday night are “likely” on the ground in southeast Michigan, according to a verified NASA Facebook page.
People from Detroit to neighboring states saw and heard the thunderous fireball at roughly 8:15 p.m. that streaked through an area northwest of Detroit,
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