![]() ![]() His contemporary William Whiston predicted that a similar comet would bring about the end of the world on 16 October 1736. ![]() He suggested in 1694 that the deluge in Genesis might have been caused by "the casual Choc of a Comet, or other transient Body". Thanks to the work of astronomer Edmond Halley, who had the famous comet named after him in 1758, comets became understood as a physical danger rather than a supernatural one, although Halley did try to reconcile his theories with Biblical scripture. "Whatever moves in the heaven in an unusual way is certainly a sign of God's wrath," said Martin Luther in the 16th Century. Among other things, they were thought to bring plague and crop failure, and herald the overthrow of kings. The first asteroid, Ceres, wasn't discovered by telescope until 1801 but comets, which were first discovered in 1680, have inspired superstition for centuries. Nasa calculates the annual odds of an impact equivalent to K-Pg as one in a million but, as the opening voiceover in Michael Bay's 1998 movie Armageddon dramatically puts it: "It happened before. Studies of K-Pg, a six-to-nine-mile-wide object making landfall with an estimated force of 100 million megatons, indicate what a similar impact might look like. The largest impact event in recorded history is the 12-megaton aerial explosion near the Tunguska river in Siberia on 30 June 1908, but that was a pebble compared to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event 66 million years ago. An asteroid (meaning star-like) is a chunk of rock and minerals from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars: no ice, no tail.ĭespite their differences, the effect of a significant collision with the Earth would be much the same, which is why all potentially dangerous bodies now come under the umbrella of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). When comets pass the sun, they shed a trail of gas and debris, hence the tail: the Greek word kometa means long-haired. ![]() A comet is a globe of ice, rock, dust and gas, originating in the outer solar system. Both are stray bits of rubble left over from the formation of the solar system. The eerie visions that predict the apocalypseĬomets and asteroids are interchangeable in impact fiction, and with good reason. With a cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep, McKay's film is a striking example of what you might call "impact fiction", a diverse sub-genre of apocalyptic fiction that goes all the way back to Edgar Allen Poe and is currently enjoying (if enjoying is the right word) a major revival. Not so the Everest-sized comet in Don't Look Up, which is only six months away at the beginning of the movie. That particular chunk of rock turns out to be no danger to Earth. On 24 November, just a couple of weeks before Adam McKay's apocalyptic disaster comedy Don't Look Up opened in cinemas, Nasa launched a spacecraft called Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) to see if it could alter the trajectory of the moonlet Dimorphos. Sometimes publicity falls out of the sky. ![]()
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