The 16-MILE wide comet responsible for the Perseid meteor shower will wipe out Earth. But nobody knows exactly when.
The space object has been recently branded one of humanity’s biggest threats.
Each year, the most powerful meteor shower, the Perseids, is created by Comet Swift-Tuttle.
Now scientists have calculated that it is only a matter of time before the comet comes closer or even strikes our planet, but nobody knows exactly when.
If the giant comet was to impact Earth, the shock would be 30 times stronger than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. The strike would release more than one billion megatons of energy – or 20,000,000 hydrogen bombs exploding all at once. This would be the largest mass extinction our world has seen in hundreds of millions of years.
In the case of Comet Swift-Tuttle, this cataclysmic event will however occur in 4479 – 2,462 years away and humans are almost sure to be safe.
The biggest threat is if the comet flies so close to Jupiter or another giant planet in our solar system and that a gravitational pull changes its trajectory toward Earth at an earlier time.
Whether discussing monumental tsunamis or the innumerable comets in the Solar System, this book, Impact!: The Threat of Comets and Asteroids, will amaze any curious readers about space, unexpected natural phenomenon, and the future of Planet Earth.
