It sounds so intuitive, doesn’t it? If something massive is coming at you, break it up into smaller pieces. The smaller pieces won’t hurt as much, and whatever it is might miss you altogether. That’s the premise of both of the Great Asteroid Movies of 1998, but a new study tells us that not only do we not have anything powerful enough on Earth to blow up these objects, but they’re likely to just re-form anyway.
A new model developed by scientists at The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland describes two stages to an Armageddon-Deep Impact event. In the first, the asteroid would indeed be split into fragments, but not completely. In fact, over the following hours, the fragments would be drawn back together by the gravitational force of the remaining core chunk of the asteroid, resulting in a new composite projectile that has nearly the power of the original.
“We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws. Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered,” says first author Charles El Mir, PhD, in a press statement.
Put in more technical language, the authors conclude, “Our results suggest that disruption thresholds for rocky asteroids are higher when energy-dissipating mechanisms such as granular flow and pore collapse are included.” Way higher, in fact.
I think we’re going to need Wyle E. Coyote for this job.
El Mir C, Ramesh KT, Richardson DC. A new hybrid framework for simulating hypervelocity asteroid impacts and gravitational reaccumulation. Icarus 2019;321(15 Mar): 1013-1025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2018.12.032
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