Comets Almost Ended Life On August 12th, 1883. Time Traveling Morgan Freeman Saved Us.
According to new findings, a wild gang of Earth-fucking comets almost ended life on our Fair Blue Marble. There was no Bruce Willis to stave disaster, but rather chance. Or the Hand of Zeus, if you swing that way.
Back in 1883, [Jose] Bonilla observed 447 objects passing in front of the sun over two days from Zacatecas, Mexico; he published his findings in a French astronomy journal. But these objects weren’t observed at larger observatories in Puebla or Mexico City, where much bigger-time scientists were standing their nighttime vigils. Why? At the time, nobody knew for sure. The editor ofL’Astronomie, where Bonilla’s findings were published, suggested that birds, insects, or dust may have passed in front of the telescope.
The team at NAUM has a different explanation. They propose that what Bonilla observed were actually fragments of a massive, billion-ton comet, and the reason that no one else was able to observe the objects is that they passed so close to the Earth that they were only visible to observers perched on a very narrow slice of the planet. It’s a parallax kinda deal. But here’s where it gets crazier: Since Mexico City and Puebla are both only about 400 miles away from Zacatecas, the team at NAUM calculate that the comet passed between 300 and 5,000 miles from Earth. 300 miles is about the distance from Philadelphia to Boston, and possibly all that stood between us and total extinction.
So Bronilla may have observed 447 objects over 2 days, but he was only counting for a total of 3.5 hours. To calculate the actual total number of fragments, the researchers at NUAM took the average number of fragments Bronilla saw per hour and multiplied it out over the entire two-day event. The total: a mind-slapping 3,275 individual pieces, all of which they believe were as big or bigger than the Tunguska event meteor in 1908. The impact at Tunguska was by moderate estimations about 15 megatons, or 1,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. 3,275 of those bombarding the planet over two days would likely be, as the authors of the paper put it, “an extinction event.”
Here’s hoping they’re right. Would make existence just a bit sexier.