Link. Interesting stuff. A new paper claims that apparently a large swarm of comet fragments comet passed “between 600 km and 8000 km of Earth” in 1883. The authors figure that they must have been that close because if they were farther away more observatories would have seen them.
They point out that nobody else on the planet seems to have seen this comet passing in front of the Sun, even though the nearest observatories in those days were just a few hundred kilometers away.
That can be explained using parallax. If the fragments were close to Earth, parallax would have ensured that they would not have been in line with the Sun even for observers nearby.
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Manterola and co end their paper by spelling out just how close Earth may have come to catastrophe that day. They point out that Bonilla observed these objects for about three and a half hours over two days. This implies an average of 131 objects per hour and a total of 3275 objects in the time between observations.
Each fragment was at least as big as the one thought to have hit Tunguska. Manterola and co end with this: “So if they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event.”
Interesting, and more than a little creepy if accurate.
:eek: You mean The Fall, the swarm of cometary impacts that destroyed Western civilization in SM Stirling’s “The Peshawar Lancers”, almost happened?
(Very good SF book, by the way. Queen Victoria relocates the British Empire to India…)