Earth under attack!
Is it just me, or does it seem we're getting more and more rocks thrown at us these days?
Turns out that earlier this month an asteroid detonated above Indonesia with a force THREE times of the Hiroshoma nuke.
The explosion - equivalent to 50,000 tons of TNT - was one of the largest asteroid kabooms ever seen.
Luckily for Indonesia, the blast caused no damage as it 'detonated' around 20km high in the atmosphere.
The University of Western Ontario said infrasound waves from the explosion rippled halfway around the world.
Estimates indicate the object was 10 metres across and was a once-in-a-decade event.
What was slightly troubling is that we had no idea it was coming until it arrived.
Only a tiny fraction of asteroids smaller than 100 metres in diameter have been catalogued and it would cost too much to attempt to do so.
That's not a very happy thought.
Weird Science Factoid: Whispering is more wearing on your voice than a normal speaking tone. What was that? I said whispering...
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
