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Impact events have been a recurring theme in fiction since the 1800s. [1] The earliest such stories tended to depict impacts by comets, [a] though other objects such as asteroids and meteoroids became more common in the 1900s. [2]
At 1 AU meteoroids bigger than 1 mm in size are in a collisional steady state. The significant excess of smaller meteoroids is due to the input from comets. Models of the interplanetary dust environment of the Earth result in 80-90% of cometary dust vs. only 10-20% of asteroidal dust.
While the event is generally held to have been caused by a meteor air burst, several alternative explanations have been proposed both in scientific circles and in fiction. [3] [4] [5] A popular one in fiction is that it was caused by an alien spaceship, possibly first put forth in Ed Earl Repp's 1930 short story "The Second Missile".
The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [16] [17] [18] An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [19] Small Solar System objects are classified by their orbits: [20] [21]
A meteor shower is at its best when the Earth passes through the densest part of the associated cosmic debris. That window, otherwise known as the shower's peak activity, is when stargazers will ...
The path of Comet ISON from December 2012 through October 2013 as it passed through Gemini, Cancer, and Leo. On 1 October 2013, Comet ISON passed within 0.07 AU (10 million km; 6.5 million mi) of Mars. Between 29 September and 2 October, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) detected Comet ISON. [50]
Antimatter comets and antimatter meteoroids are hypothetical comets and meteoroids composed solely of antimatter instead of ordinary matter.Although never actually observed, and unlikely to exist anywhere within the Milky Way, they have been hypothesized to exist, and their existence, on the presumption that hypothesis is correct, has been put forward as one possible explanation for various ...
A meteoroid is a small piece of an asteroid or comet. Meteoroids are usually the size of a pebble but can range in size from dust grains to small asteroids. Asteroids can range in size from ...