Exploding Meteors, Asteroids, And Near Earth Objects

Tell us about these events. Why are they capturing so much attention?

There are two big events on February 15th: the explosion of a meteor over Russia and the near flyby of asteroid DA14. The events seem to be unrelated, but of course they both point to the potential threats to Earth from asteroid impacts. It’s very rare for a meteor to cause significant damage in a populated area, which is why the Russian event is attracting so much attention.

What can we learn from this?

What the public can learn from these events is the need to think carefully about the long-term hazards presented by asteroids. Although there are ongoing efforts to identify and characterize all potentially threatening NEOS (near Earth objects) obviously these efforts do not yet catch small objects, such as the one that exploded unexpectedly over Russia today. Not only do we need to do a lot more work finding all of these objects long before they pose a threat, we need to figure out how to destroy or, more likely, divert them. There is much to be done.

How does this relate to your research or teaching?

This doesn’t tie in with my own research, which is mainly about star formation. It does tie in with the curriculum of AST 101, “The Sun and Its Neighbours”. We do a section in that course on meteors and asteroids, discussing the threat they pose to Earth. In fact, I like to start that course off with a brief history of all of the times that life on Earth has been devastated by what seem to have been asteroid impacts. Extinction-level events are rare, but when they occur, everything changes. Mammals—and in particular human beings—dominate Earth today in part because the way was cleared for us by the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Hopefully there won’t be ant-people or slime-mold-people ruling the Earth in a few million years, talking about how the way was cleared for them when humans failed to avert their own annihilation. We talk about that kind of thing in AST 101.

What drew you to this field?

I was drawn to astronomy because of its potential to deal with these kinds of big issues. Who could not find the potential extinction of the human race fascinating? Of course, there are many other great mysteries in astronomy: How do stars and planets form? Is life rare or common in the cosmos? How did the universe come to exist? What are the natures of dark matter and dark energy, which seem to make up 96 per cent of the contents of the universe? There are so many amazing questions left to be answered.