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Second "Mayan" asteroid to pass by Earth today!
As if 12/12/12 wasn’t curious enough of a date already with the whole Mayan-doomsday-but-not-really thing, there’s also the dicey issue of tomorrow’s relatively close encounter with the huge (nearly three miles long) 4179 Toutatis asteroid, expected to pass within 4 million miles of Earth. As the author of this story puts it, “On the scale of the cosmos, that is a very close shave.”But if you think that’s too close for comfort, how about an asteroid passing within just 140,000 miles (only 60% of the distance between the Earth and moon) of our planet? Guess what?... already happened earlier this morning.
Discovered only two days ago, XE54 came about as close to crashing into Earth as an asteroid can without actually doing so - close enough to be “eclipsed by Earth’s shadow, causing its shadow to ‘wink out’ for a short time,” according to Universe Today.
With a diameter of just 72-160 feet, XE54 is a far cry from the over six-mile wide asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs (and about 50% of all life’s species) 65 million years ago. But, while it’s possible an asteroid of this size would produce nothing more than a brilliant fireball as it disintegrated after entering the atmosphere, a direct hit by remaining rock chunks on a populated region could be disastrous.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/newly-discovered-small-asteroid-just-misses-colliding-with-earth-next-up-is-much-bigger-121212-asteroid/2012/12/11/51048aae-43a4-11e2-9648-a2c323a991d6_blog.html
And to boot the phones aren't working at my job and one land phone literally jumped off its hook.
Hopefully this is just the universe poking fun at us.
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We'll get through this. [img]
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Hopefully they'll be wearing mayan outfits just for the occasion.
