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Out There

Jun-19 » Filed Under: Whatever » Posted by: Todd

Forget global warming, we need to be more concerned about space rocks. Excerpt:

These standard assumptions--that remaining space rocks are few, and that encounters with planets were mainly confined to the past--are being upended. On March 18, 2004, for instance, a 30-meter asteroid designated 2004 FH--a hunk potentially large enough to obliterate a city--shot past Earth, not far above the orbit occupied by telecommunications satellites. (Enter "2004 FH" in the search box at Wikipedia and you can watch film of that asteroid passing through the night sky.) Looking at the broader picture, in 1992 the astronomers David Jewitt, of the University of Hawaii, and Jane Luu, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered the Kuiper Belt, a region of asteroids and comets that starts near the orbit of Neptune and extends for immense distances outward. At least 1,000 objects big enough to be seen from Earth have already been located there. These objects are 100 kilometers across or larger, much bigger than whatever dispatched the dinosaurs; space rocks this size are referred to as "planet killers" because their impact would likely end life on Earth. Investigation of the Kuiper Belt has just begun, but there appear to be substantially more asteroids in this region than in the asteroid belt, which may need a new name.

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