We could have been the next victims of an asteroid! It's something scary to think about, isn't it?
Here we are on our planet, each one of us doing our own thing and more-or-less minding our own business (except for the metiches) and then, "bam!" A giant rock, a 150-foot-wide asteroid, slams into our planet!
How big is 150 feet? Try this: Start walking towards the VMT theatre from the corner where the school office is (Main Avenue and Houston Street), cross the street (Santa Clotilde Avenue), and stop half-way down that block, in front of the house with the rose bushes.
According to an Associated Press story, the asteroid will be at least 17,100 miles from earth when it passes us next Friday (Feb. 15). That's nearing almost double the distance from Laredo to the Southeast Asian country of Singapore which is about 9,903 miles from us, says http://distancebetween.net/laredo-tx-us/SIN.
Scientists say there is nothing for us to worry about since it will be kind-of far away when it zips past Earth.
"No Earth impact is possible," Donald Yeomans, a NASA official, told Associate Press reporter Marcia Dunn in a story that appeared in Friday's (Feb. 8) Laredo Morning Times. (Here's a slightly different version of that story online.)
He added that the asteroid hitting one of our satellites flying in an orbit 22,300 miles above Earth is not likely.
"No one has raised a red flag, nor will they," Yeomans told reporters. "I certainly don't anticipate any problems whatsoever."
So, how did dinosaurs become part of this blog?
I've marveled about how dinosaurs supposedly became extinct when an asteroid is said to have hit the Earth millions of years ago.
Online stories I found this morning (Feb. 8) while looking for more asteroid-passing-the-Earth stories discuss the relationship between the asteroid impact and dinosaurs dying.
One story, by reporter Irene Klotz of the Reuters (pronounced Roy'-tərz) news agency, state a giant asteroid that hit the area in Mexico we call Yucatan Peninsula was responsible for dinosaurs dying off much sooner than expected -- actually thousands of years sooner!
From the story: The study ... said the events occurred within 33,000 years of each other.
Can you imagine? Previously, some scientists thought the time between asteroid impact and dinosaur deaths was as much as 300,000 years! But apparently not any more.
From the story: "Our work basically puts a nail in that coffin," geologist Paul Renne of the University of California Berkeley said, as he talked about why at least some scientists no longer use the 300,000 years figure.
I don't know about you, but I have a hard time trying to imagine 33,000 years, much less 300,000 years! Even one year is sometimes hard to imagine!
Another story, by livescience.com reporter Charlie Choi, also linked dinosaur deaths to a changing climate that was sped up when the asteroid hit.
From story number 2: "It's gratifying to see these results, for those of us who've been arguing a long time that there was an impact at the time of this mass extinction," geologist Walter Alvarez at the University of California at Berkeley, who did not participate in this study, (said). "This research is just a tour de force, a demonstration of really skillful geochronology to resolve time that well."
From what I understood from both stories, the asteroid, said to be about 6 miles wide, struck the Yucatan Peninsula.
Can you imagine how enormous a rock about 6 miles wide would be? I can't, so I looked to Yahoo for some help. According to Yahoo maps, the distance between the school's office and Target on I-35, between Best Buy and HEB, is 4.62 miles! So you'd have another 1.38 to go equal the size of that asteroid!
Anyway, what could we have expected should that asteroid had hit the Earth?
For starters, it would throw up tons and tons of dust and other stuff into the atmosphere, likely creating a perpetual darkness over much or all of the world. That darkness would mean that grasses, crops and all other plants needing sunlight to survive would eventually die. Cattle, sheep, goats, lambs, rabbits and other creatures needing grass and other plants to survive would eventually starve to death. People, not having access to crops and animals, would eventually die as existing food supplies would be used up.
On top of that, can you imagine what would happen to lakes and rivers as the dust and pollutants in the dust cloud settle? Would we be able to drink water from lakes full of dust?
Well, enough of this negativity! Hopefully we can look forward to scientists taking photos of this asteroid and allow us a rare opportunity to look at this wandering creature of space.
http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/schoolid/30/articleid/575545/newspaperid/6/Us_dinosaurs_and_the_asteroid.aspx