– remember to look up –
Apparently, if you smell a fresh meteorite it smells like sulphur, according to reports about the Tagish Lake meteorite and the aroma that filled the air during its fall in 2000. And the Aguas Zarcas meteorite that fell in Costa Rica in 2019 has been said to smell of compost, vanilla and Brussels sprouts, depending …
Last year I did some digging around for space rocks – that's movies about space rocks. The idea was to compile a list of every asteroid and comet disaster movie ever made, from the very first silent black and white offering in 1916, to those well-known blockbusters that launch at us the whole arsenal of …
Continue reading "Every Asteroid and Comet Disaster Movie Ever Made"
It's the end of the year and some tabloid newspapers are again warning us that it could soon be the end of the world – yes, asteroid 2019 AE3 is in our vicinity and closing in. In keeping with the drama, below is a list of every cinema and TV drama ever made that feature …
Continue reading "70 Movies and TV Shows Featuring Earth-Threatening Asteroids and Comets"
So there's another apocalyptic asteroid warning in the tabloid news headlines. The lead scaremongerer in the UK is the Daily Express, who started out playfully alerting us to asteroids that will skim by Earth in the coming days. It didn't take long for a war of the digital world to start warning of swarms of …
I once read a quote in a conference abstract that stated the paper had been written to serve as “a historical guide to the asteroid literature for the perplexed”. That quote aptly sums up my desire for writing a piece on the history of asteroid classification and taxonomies, and the schemes currently in use. When …
More than 100 years have passed since the first film was shown in movie theatres that depicted events surrounding a rock from space making an impact with Earth. In that case, it was a comet rather than an asteroid. The movie, a silent film called The End of the World (1916), was inspired by the …
Continue reading "Making an Impact: Lights, Camera and Asteroid!"
Many people will remember the day in 2013 when one asteroid stole the limelight from another. On 15 February 2013, all eyes of astronomers were on the close approach of a 30 metre-sized Apollo asteroid 367943 Duende (then known as 2012 DA14). The asteroid was not expected to be visible to the naked eye. Nor …
Continue reading "Real and Simulated Asteroid and Comet Impacts"
In this post I go down a rocky road of clarifying some of the often confused terminology relating to asteroid and comet impacts and the associated phenomena of meteoroids, meteors and meteorites. Much of the confusion is due to misunderstanding and misuse of the terms in the media and movies, but somewhat surprisingly you can …