Potentially Hazardous Asteroids:

The most underrated threat to our planet might be impact events that threaten our small world. Most meteors and asteroids may be incredibly small; however, even the largest are discreet and almost undetectable until it"s too late to do anything about them -- a situation that played out just last year, with the Chelyabinsk Meteor in Russia. If that impact didn"t open your eyes to the danger of these objects, perhaps this newly released image will.

Learn about the significance of this image at
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/14300/

Image via
NASA

Tonight, Meteors will light up the winter sky:

If you"re in the Northern Hemisphere, you"re in luck! Tonight, turn your eyes towards the Big Dipper"s handle and look to the west of the bright star Arcturus. If the weather is favorable (and light pollution isn"t clouding the skies and obscuring your view), then you should be able to see some 80-200 meteors per an hour streaking through the sky. If you"ve never seen a meteor shower before, be sure to check it out this evening starting at midnight and carrying on until dawn. They are truly glorious events, and definitely worth a little lost shut-eye.

These meteors will blast into Earth"s atmosphere at about 90,000 miles per hour (144,800 km/h), but you"ve no need to fear any deadly cataclysms. The typical bright meteor is produced by a particle with a mass less than 1 gram...no larger than a pea. So even if the Quadrantids set the sky aglow, you"ve nothing to fear.

Want to learn more amazing facts about meteors and how to find them? See:
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/tonight-meteors-will-light-up-the-winter-sky/

Image via
http://www.flickr.com/photos/73449134@N04/8343003942/in/photolist-dHf5py-dH9EGv-dH6aWh-97BHji-b7byEF-b7byVX

On Doomsday and Humanity"s Role in the Destruction of Earth:

Doomsday was supposed to happen in 1999 when we discovered the West Nile virus in the United States. When summer passed and the world didn’t end, we pushed the apocalypse back to 2000 and focused all our fears on the dreaded Y2K. Once we made it through the first days of the new millennium, we quickly convinced ourselves that the Bird Flu epidemic would surely bring an end to civilization. Somehow, we managed to muddle through all of this, only to face the ancient Maya prophecy which claimed that the world would end in 2012.

Now, my throat may be a little scratchy from seasonal allergies, and I might have a burn on the top of my mouth from drinking tea that was a tad too hot, but other than that, it seems that I’ve made it through the end of the world relatively unscathed. In fact, it seems that nearly everyone made it through these doomsday scenarios pretty much intact. So although I hate to make sweeping generalizations, I have to say that we might be just a *little* obsessed with the end of the world.

In some respects, our fascination with the apocalypse is understandable. After all, the end of the world would be one of the most important events in the history of, well, the world. But our obsession is borderline maniacal.

Read about this obsession, and whether humans can really destroy the Earth, at:
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/on-doomsday-and-humanitys-role-in-the-destruction-of-earth/

Image:
NASA/Colum Five Media
http://www.columnfivemedia.com/

Could we prevent an asteroid collision?

In its early life, the Earth would have been peppered nearly continuously with asteroids and debris. Today, the Earth still receives thousands of tons of matter from space, but this is in the form of microscopic dust particles. Fortunately, a large asteroid colliding with the surface of the Earth is very rare. Nevertheless, it does happen from time to time. You probably heard about the Russian Chelyabinsk meteor which hit in February of this year. It entered at a shallow angle at 60 times the speed of sound, and it exploded in an air burst. The size of this body of rock (before it burnt up and shattered) was estimated to be around 20 m across and weighec13,000 metric tons. This isn"t large by any means, but it was enough to injure over a thousand people and damage nearly 20,000 buildings.

Lucky for us, larger impacts are very rare. Most notable of all these larger impacts is the 10 km sized object that is widely believed to have initiated the dinosaurs" extinction some 65 million years ago. But what would happen if we were faced with such a threat today?

Read all about this at:
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/could-we-prevent-an-asteroid-collisio/

Image source:
ALAMY