Support NeoGAF

[hydragonwarrior]

The comments had a good question - is this comet an every 2 million year thing or...

 

[Kaladin]

Ha

It was obviously 450 alien saucers leaving their mothership.

Check this out.

This guy witnessed the so called "comet" on the 12th and 13th August 1883

Then on:

August 26–August 28 – Krakatoa or Krakatau volcano erupts at 10:02 AM (local time); 163 villages are destroyed, 36,380 killed.

Coincidence?

 

[vilmer_]

August 12th. My birthday

 

[Log4Girlz]

August 12th. My birthday

Damn you're old.

 

[CabbageRed]

Could have turned the planet into a lifeless rock for thousands, if not millions of years.

Crazy.

We've come unnervingly close before.

Permian–Triassic extinction event (End Permian) – 251 Ma at the Permian-Triassic transition. Earth's largest extinction killed 57% of all families and 83% of all genera[5] (53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera, about 96% of all marine species and an estimated 70% of land species) including insects.[7] The evidence of plants is less clear, but new taxa became dominant after the extinction.[8] The "Great Dying" had enormous evolutionary significance: on land, it ended the primacy of mammal-like reptiles. The recovery of vertebrates took 30 million years,[9] but the vacant niches created the opportunity for archosaurs to become ascendant. In the seas, the percentage of animals that were sessile dropped from 67% to 50%. The whole late Permian was a difficult time for at least marine life, even before the "Great Dying".

 

[pestul]

I think we've got a pretty good handle on colossal asteroids/comets out there.. but I'm always fearful of that random gamma-ray burst (hypothesized for 450ma extinction). That shit would happen so randomly. Imagine how strange it would be on the far side of the planet from the event, but only to have the ozone layer vaporized so that when the sun rose you'd be cooked by solar radiation (or cosmic rays before that anyway)? :S

 

[Log4Girlz]

I think we've got a pretty good handle on colossal asteroids/comets out there.. but I'm always fearful of that random gamma-ray burst (hypothesized for 450ma extinction). That shit would happen so randomly. Imagine how strange it would be on the far side of the planet from the event, but only to have the ozone layer vaporized so that when the sun rose you'd be cooked by solar radiation (or cosmic rays before that anyway)? :S

Recently we dramatically increased our knowledge of nearly all the near earth asteroids in existence. Sadly, comets travel too far out and are practically invisible when away from the sun to have any idea just how many there are or what their orbits are.

 

[Kibbles]

Only a few hundred miles... really?

 

[hydragonwarrior]

I think we've got a pretty good handle on colossal asteroids/comets out there.. but I'm always fearful of that random gamma-ray burst (hypothesized for 450ma extinction). That shit would happen so randomly. Imagine how strange it would be on the far side of the planet from the event, but only to have the ozone layer vaporized so that when the sun rose you'd be cooked by solar radiation (or cosmic rays before that anyway)? :S

THat only happens from a super nova right? I think that would be more predictable since we know all of the nearby Supergiant stars. Even the closest one, if it goes Nova (or if it already has) probably won't reach us for a good few centuries, and from what I've heard that radiation won't be directed towards Earth.

 

[Lucky Forward]

Original article updated:

http://gizmodo.com/5850500/the-day-all-life-on-earth-almost-ended

Skeptic's Update: Phil Plait, who writes the exceptional Bad Astronomy blog, has some serious concerns about the paper out of UNAM. He argues that a fragmented comet with thousands of large pieces would have millions of smaller pieces, and the spread of those would certainly carry many of those into Earth's atmosphere at the speculated range:

If there were hundreds of objects this size, there would've been millions as small [as] a few centimeters across. Objects that size make brilliant fireballs as they burn up in our atmosphere, and would've been visible during the day, even with the Sun shining. Again, no reports of any meteor storms, despite a comet being a few thousand kilometers away and a million kilometers long.