Asteroids: The Cosmic Killers 1. The earth is occasionally hit by craggy remnants of creation known as asteroids. About 150 are known to cross the earth’s path. These lie in a loose belt between the Mars and Jupiter like so much rubble left over from creation. The first asteroid was too faint to be seen by the naked eye. It was discovered by an Italian monk named Guiseppi Piazzi, working at an observatory in Palermo, Sicily. The largest found so far is about 8 km wide. 2. Slamming into the earth at roughly 26 km a second, a large asteroid could explode with the force of a million hydrogen... Show more

Asteroids: The Cosmic Killers

1. The earth is occasionally hit by craggy remnants of creation known as asteroids. About 150 are known to cross the earth’s path. These lie in a loose belt between the Mars and Jupiter like so much rubble left over from creation. The first asteroid was too faint to be seen by the naked eye. It was discovered by an Italian monk named Guiseppi Piazzi, working at an observatory in Palermo, Sicily. The largest found so far is about 8 km wide.
2. Slamming into the earth at roughly 26 km a second, a large asteroid could explode with the force of a million hydrogen bombs, lofting enough pulverised rock and dust to block most sunlight. Cold and darkness could last for months, crippling agriculture and probably a good part of modern civilization, leading to the deaths of a billion or more people from starvation.
3. "The risk is real", Dr David Morrison of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Ames Research Centre in California, who was co-chairman of the study by nearly 100 scientists, said in an interview. Dr Morrison further says that the asteroid threat has dawned on scientists only slowly and is hard for layman to comprehend. But the unambiguous fact, he said, is that mankind lives in a kind of cosmic shooting gallery.
4. Dr Morrison says that there are clues of the asteroids in the large number of impact craters found throughout the solar system by robot spacecraft exploring planets. There are numerous craters found by geologists on the earth also. Some 130 have been discovered with the list growing by five or six a year. The largest crater, which is in Ontario, is 198 km from rim to rim.
5. New awareness of asteroid impacts has increased the appreciation of close encounters and mysterious events. In 1908 in the Tunguska region of Siberia a cosmic object that never reached the earth’s surface exploded in the atmosphere with a force of some 20 hydrogen bombs. The resulting shock wave flattened hundreds of square miles of forest. Scientists now calculate the object was perhaps a mere 38 m in diameter. (351 words)

Word-Notes : Craggy-stony, चट्टानी Remnants-an amount or part that remains, अवशेष Rubble-broken pieces of a building, कबाड़| Slamming-hitting, टकराना| Lofting– hitting into the air, हवा में उछालना| Pulverised-crushed, चुश बनी| Crippling—destroying, नष्ट करना| Unambiguous-clear, स्पष्ट Clues-indications, सुराग| Impact-collision, टकराव| Craters-large hole, a bowl-shaped depression with a raised rim, formed by the impact of a meteoroid, ज्वालामुखी, कटोरे के आकार का एक ऐसा गड्ढा जो किसी उल्कापिण्ड के टकराने से बना हो। Appreciation-understanding, समझ Encounters—impacts, टकराव|

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