I’ve always liked this (Disney) visualization of this big meteor. Pretty cool stuff. Gives you a general idea of a moderate sized meteor:
Grownup commentary:
The real one would have been thousands of times worse…being close enough to see the white light casting stark shadows, you might also be toasted by the thermal radiation.
If not that, then obliterated by the impact energy directly, or the white-hot material being spread all over the place.
These critters are close enough to the impact site to get a shockwave after just a few seconds, but go on to survive the blast.
So…this impact would not have been enough to kill off the dinosaurs, sorry!
In the real impact, the hunk of rock slammed down into Mexico, and debris from the impact rained down as far north as Kentucky. This isn’t stuff that was kicked into the atmosphere and floated around for a bit before coming back down, this was stuff that went on a ballistic trajectory just from the impact.
The carbon layer found all over the world indicates that the entire world burned afterwards, so most likely, hot stuff thrown up into the atmosphere then literally rained fire all over the world for some time afterwards.
Add in some nice tsunamis and massive earthquakes, especially at the antipode, where all of the shock waves traveling around the Earth came back together and caused massive damage to the crust, resulting in huge volcanic eruptions that went on for years and years afterwards.
Sounds like a pretty good description of Hell on Earth to me.
The Disney version is never quite as bad as the real thing, is it?
I think this was shared here during another similar discussion. Here is another artistic rendering of something a bit larger than Chicxulub striking the modern Earth…defintely aligned on the “hot” that would have come afterward…
Even if you don’t count Theia (and it isn’t 100% certain that happened), there’ve been larger objects hitting the Earth. Their craters have mostly been erased by erosion or subduction, the Vredefort Crater is still at least partially there.
54 seconds before this asteroid hit, it was as large as the full moon in the sky. So it seems the observers might have had a bit more warning than just ten seconds.
If it was an asteroid or short period comet, decades. The thing was over 10 km across and pretty much all asteroids of that size have been discovered. There are people out there who predict the future orbits of such bodies and determine if they pose a threat to collision with Earth. However, if it was a long period comet, we might have only half a year or so. Those come from the far reaches of the Solar System and we only see them when they get to the inner system.
As Dave Barry would say, “…Chicxulub (pronounced ‘Chicxulub’)…”
Any creature that saw that thing enter the atmosphere wouldn’t have lived to see the aftermath.
Here’s a near-miss from 1972. I first saw this in the late 1970s, during a TV show about UFOs, and my dad, commenting on the voice-over, said, “That’s not a weather balloon.” And he was right; it’s believed to have passed through the atmosphere at an altitude of about 40 miles, and was probably the size of a house.
Difficult to say. Jupiter perturbs the orbits of lots of objects in the outer Solar System, and many of them are pretty dark, so they don’t reflect a lot of light. After swinging around the Sun, they can cross the Earth’s orbital path, and not be detected until after they have passed. Most comets are discovered by amateur astronomers, because of their knowledge of the stars. An asteroid can be much more difficult to detect, because it is so dark. Objects coming up from the Sun are especially hard to see, because the glare blinds the viewer.
Nitpick: Amateurs don’t find the majority of comets because the have better knowledge of the stars. They find them because large observatories can’t spare the kind of telescope time required to go comet-hunting, there are a LOT of amateurs looking, and amateur equipment works very well for comet hunting as you don’t need particularly large optics, and wide field views are perfect for hunting comets.
I suspect the ratio will change when the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is operational. Amateurs will have a hard time competing with that.
Any creature that saw that thing enter the atmosphere wouldn’t have lived to see the aftermath.
Here’s a near-miss from 1972. I first saw this in the late 1970s, during a TV show about UFOs, and my dad, commenting on the voice-over, said, “That’s not a weather balloon.” And he was right; it’s believed to have passed through the atmosphere at an altitude of about 40 miles, and was probably the size of a house.
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A meteor the size of a house will make a big boom but it’s nowhere near an extinction-level event like the Chicxulub impactor. The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor was about the size of a house (20 meters).
