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Meteorites and asteroids represent for our planet where greater danger than many are accustomed to consider.
Imagine that the solar system is a huge tennis court, and the Earth is a cat sitting on it. The court is large, and the cat and constantly flying tennis balls – small, from which you can to conclude that any throw of the ball is more likely to hit the animal than vice versa. However, if you look at the situation soberly, it becomes it’s clear that the cat has every chance of being shot down. That’s just her if you want to run away, dodge the ball if he feels danger, and the Earth, on which a large meteorite is moving, to disappear just nowhere.
University of Buckingham argues that the greatest the danger is not those celestial bodies that are located in asteroid belts between Jupiter and Mars, and much more distant from Earth objects represented by centaur asteroids. They have properties like asteroids and comets, due to which they got their name. Centaurs, recall, are half-humans, half-horses from ancient Greek mythology.
Once every forty-one hundred thousand years, one of these celestial bodies thrown towards the Earth by a gravitational field. Approaching To the sun, the asteroid centaur gradually decays, acquiring a tail from your own wreckage. Scientists suggest that our planet while lucky, and similar objects did not come across it. Nonetheless, it could very well happen. The mass of such an object will be many times exceed the weight of all comets and asteroids that ever fell to Earth. If such a body really falls on our planet, the bombardment of its fragments may continue tens of thousands of years, completely destroying all life on Earth.
Scientists believe that humanity needs to start preparing for such a scenario, first of all, starting a thorough study centaur asteroids.
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