Possibly close enough to scrape the outer atmosphere, but not crashing to earth. I think there may be some interesting tidal activity, small rock sized debris making it to the ground, and an incredible light show. I have heard they fly by very close (like within 500,000 miles or so) more than we would like to think. Has there been recorded incidences of near misses happening? Of course, any incident more than 200 or so years ago would have been explained differently?
In summary:
What would happen?
Has it Happened in recorded history?
I don’t think it came quite that close, but I remember a science teacher telling me that a huge asteroid once came so close to Earth that if the Earth had been 3 hours behind in its revolutions around the sun, it would have hit.
Meteors strike the Earth every day. Many burn up on entry, but a few make it. I have no idea what the difference is between meteors and asteroids, though.
If a large body came grazing close to earth, its orbit would temporarily reverse, oceans would split down the middle, and food would fall from the sky.
And yes, it has happened in recorded history. Read the Bible.
A meteor the size of the dinosaur killer might be the size of a mountain. There would be no gravitational effects felt on earth from something that small. The tides wouldn’t be effected, etc.
Now, if you could find something the size of the moon and send it close enough to actually pass through the atmosphere, you might have some fun.
It would scare the bejeezus out of a whole lot of people, and that’s about it.
As to other near misses, what do you call “near”? I’ve seen hype over “near-misses” every couple of years or so, but in every case, the object’s closest approach has been several times the distance to the Moon. An object which grazed the atmosphere, but did not hit the surface, would be a very near miss indeed: If the Earth were scaled down to the size of a large apple, the atmosphere would be thinner than the apple’s skin. The surface would be a far easier target, and that’s only been hit by killer-sized bodies a handfull of times in the past few billion years.
Thanks a bunch! A very informative article. There was even a picture of a meteor scraping and skipping off the atmosphere. Although all that was noticeable was the people looking up in the sky.
I have seen a video of that Wyoming daylight meteor, but I couldn’t find it on the Web. One program that showed it was an episode of “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World” which was about UFOs.
That link also says “From 1975 to 1992, nuclear detonation detecting satellites recorded 136 atmospheric blasts in the megatons-of-TNT range.” You’d think more people would notice those! But that’s probably wrong. The page at http://www.tiac.net/users/lewkaren/meteorobs/msg03146.html quotes Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher Doug ReVelle:
Meteors are generally specks of dust/sand-like particles (from comet tails etc.) that hit the atmosphere every day (a.k.a. shooting stars).
Asteroids are big rocks (or rocks/ice or gravitationally-bound collections of gravel, etc.) that are left over from the formation of the solar system. These can range in size from 100s of meters to many, many kilometers in diameter.
Not sure what you call the stuff in between. I suppose most of that stuff is not visible to our telescopes. But if it burns up in the atmosphere, it’s a meteor.
The meteor is in the upper right-hand corner of the frame. It is the left one of two roughly equally sized spots closest to the top of the frame. If you look very carefully you can see the meteor’s trail stretching out behind it almost all the way across the frame.
A pretty unsettling picture, all in all, if you think about it.
