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Posted on 09/23/2007 8:35:38 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
A few million years ago, two asteroids collided in interplanetary space. The smaller, aggressor rock was pulverized to dust as it shattered the larger target rock into millions of small and large fragments which were violently dispersed in all sorts of new directions... David Nesvorny and his colleagues at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have identified 39 known asteroids as debris from a collision that took place practically yesterday in the history of the solar system. These new creations are expected to be largely unaltered since their violent generation just 5.8 million years ago. The largest remnant is an asteroid named Karin, roughly 12.5 miles wide (20 kilometers). The cluster of boulders, which all exhibit similar composition, has now been given the same name. The Karin cluster was born when an asteroid estimated to be 1.9 miles wide (3 kilometers) slammed into a 16-mile-wide (25 kilometers) rock at about 11,180 mph (5 km/s), Nesvorny explained. The target rock was 600 times more massive than the smaller one. At least hundreds and perhaps thousands of fragments larger than 0.62 miles (1 kilometer) were produced, Nesvorny said. An asteroid this large could cause a global catastrophe if it met up with Earth. The collision also generated up to 100 million fragments as big as a football field, he said. Such rocks could destroy a city. Preliminary observations also found space dust that appears to be associated with the crash... The study team also included William F. Bottke Jr, Luke Dones & Harold F. Levison, all of the SwRI, which is in Boulder, Colorado.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
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While I’m a traditional-values kind of guy, I’m not all that choked up about this ‘nuclear’ family, merely created on a theorist’s simulator and not exactly replicable...
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith
I was wondering if this family is relation to hemorrhoid family down the block?
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