“I have grown, looking at sky and stars.” Many people can say this, including me. We loved to watch stars in night. We enjoyed the Sunrise and Sunsets. And offcourse, millions of people loves NASA’s Astronomy Pic Of the Day and they like to add APOD as their wallpapers. There are many more beautiful phenomena in the universe, like Solar Eclipse, Eagle Nebula, Aurora etc. We feel safe, cheer and enjoy our life. However, it does not mean that a smaller strike of any tragedy cannot happen even as you are reading this blog. For a horrible example, who was knowing about the latest Tsunami in Japan, before the date it occured?
The theory of gravity is not enough developed that you can exactly state the motion of a planet or star or any other material in the space. Some bodies, like dwarf planets, sattelites, meteoroids, have random motions. The most fearful motion is of meteoroids, the rock like structures. Usually these are found in between Mars and Jupiter as a belt. But when a meteoroid leaves the belt, the gravitational attraction of the earth, nearest planet to mars, can pull that into it. When a meteoroid enters the atmosphere, friction causes it to heat up and glow. Then we call it a shooting star or a meteor. Small meteors burn up completely as they pass through the atmosphere. Larger ones end up on earth as meteoroid. Impact craters are formed when a large meteoroid or comet crashes into a planet. One such massive natural hazard happened in past, which destroyed all the Dinosaurs.
I don’t know more about these collisions. But whatever I know, cost it to list a few of catastrophic collisions. While watching the pics of impacts of the collisions, you’ll find them beautiful. But think what would happened then, when this incident occured.
Impact Craters
- The Barringer Crater (also called Canyon Diablo, Arizona Crater) in Arizona, USA is the result of an impact event that happened approximately 30,000 or 40,000 years ago and is the first confirmed asteroid crater on Earth. It is named after Daniel M. Barringer, who was the first to suggest that it was the result of an impact. The size of the crater is huge — over a kilometer across.
- The Wolf Creek Crater is one of the largest craters measuring roughly 900 meters in diameter. According to NASA, it is estimated that the crater formed some 300,000 years ago when a meteorite weighing more than 50,000 tons strucked the Earth at an estimated speed of 15 km/second.
- The Aorouga Crater has a diameter of about 17km. Scientists think that it was formed as a part of a multiple-impact event that scarred northern Chad several million years ago.
- The Roter Kamm impact crater in Namibia was formed by a meteorite that collide with Earth approximately 5 million years ago. It is 2.5 km in diameter and is 130 m deep.
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