What an asteroid would look like hitting the earth
Asteroids are small bodies composed of rocky and metallic objects
that were unable to form distinct planets when the solar system was born.
They orbit the sun, most of them traveling in a belt between Mars and
Jupiter. In fact the so called minor planets can be sent to erratic orbits
by the gravitational pull of Jupiter, causing them to collide with planets
and other asteroids.
These asteroids which means ‘star like’ is called so because
compared with comets they do not emit a fuzzy appearance. It has been
suggested that the asteroids were materials left over from the formation
of the solar system. It is very much possible that asteroids were actually
left over materials that never coalesced into a planet. The largest of the
asteroids so far discovered is Ceres which has a diameter of less than
1000km. An asteroid can also be as tiny as pebbles. An interesting
observation is that even if the estimated total mass of all the asteroids
was gathered into a single object, it would still be less than half the
diameter of the moon.
So far some seven thousand asteroids have been identified in the
asteroid belt. Among them, the interesting one is asteroid is Ida which
has a tiny moon of 1.5km called Dactyl. Asteroids too have simple
rotations around a fixed axis that range from one hour to one day.
However, the asteroid 4179 Toutatis, crossing the earth’s orbit has been observed to have an erratic rotation. Maybe a result of history of a violent collision that is very common for asteroids. The possibility of a collision with earth is not unfounded as some 300 of them crossing the orbit of the earth and other inner planets has been noted. Enlightening news is none of the identified asteroids are unlikely to hit the earth. But caution still need to be maintained as there are still thousands unidentified asteroids much greater in size that’s orbiting around earth.