Word: asteroidal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This isn't the first time Oprah has teased us. Sure, last week Oprah Winfrey announced that she's going to stop hosting her talk show in 2006, but she says this every so often, like the astronomers do about an asteroid heading toward the earth. But people actually read the articles about Oprah...
Nearly all of us now know--or think we know--how the dinosaurs perished: some 65 million years ago, a giant asteroid or comet struck the earth, spewing huge amounts of dust and debris into the air. That dust, according to a widely accepted theory first proposed by Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, was circulated by the winds and enshrouded the earth for months, blocking sunlight and causing temperatures to plummet. As a result, the dinosaurs, and 70% of all other terrestrial species, were wiped...
Earth received a cosmic calling card last week. It arrived in the form of a huge rock, about 1,000 ft. in diameter, that hurtled past the planet at 68,000 m.p.h. The asteroid, newly dubbed 2001 YB5, missed us by some 500,000 miles, about twice our distance from the moon. For astronomers, however, that was a hairbreadth, and a dramatic reminder that space is filled with debris that has devastated our planet in the past and could very likely to do so again...
...been on target, says Donald Yeomans, a senior scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it would have struck with the explosive force of some 4,000 megatons, enough to obliterate a major metropolitan center and the surrounding countryside. But what troubles most scientists is that the asteroid was detected only two weeks before it flew by. If it had been headed toward impact, those in the target area would have had barely enough time to write their wills. Eleanor Helin, whose Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking group discovered the asteroid, estimates that, on average, one object the size...
...imagination credibility gap. Prior to the attacks, we may well have imagined the possibility of using planes to destroy buildings, or the capture of Air Force One, or the stealing of a nuclear device to threaten the world, or the earth colliding with a Rhode Island-sized asteroid. But all of these thoughts were not possibilities to be feared or contingencies to be mulled over, but rather idle flights of fancy, suitable only for the most base movie or trite short story...