Comment on What would happen to the Earth if it got booped by a giant asteroid going super slowly?
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
It wouldn’t
Earth’s gravity would make it accelerate from a far away distance and when it would hit, it hit with speeds greater than a bullet.
An entire large island hitting earth at those speeds usually means game over for humanity and maybe even all life in this universe
Not that we’d need any help in doing that, were perfectly capable of doing that ourselves
altphoto@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
But only if it was already exactly in a crash course. Otherwise it would end up as a moon as soon as it missed crashing the first time.
Tedesche@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s much more likely that it would either fly away at another trajectory or circle back several times before eventually hitting us. In order for it to become another Earth satellite, it would have to miss us at a very precise angle and speed in order to get trapped in a stable orbit around us.
altphoto@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Well the moon is falling away. It’s actually much harder to fall into earth by having the exact direction to actually hit us directly. This is because space is mostly empty. If you think of your self as an intergalactic giant that would try to hit earth from far away using a moon marvel what would you see as the target? Yup, a pale blue dot. But try anyway because putin and the other undesirables live here and they want to get to you on a rocket.