“Photography in the style of a traditional Chinese painting of late Song and Yuan dynasties

← yesterday’s APOD: the transit of Venus from 2004. Another transit will happen next June. A new paper claims that unusual objects observed by José Bonilla in August of 1883 were quite possibly the remains of a comet that had broken up. The authors used parallax to calculate that the fragments must have passed between 8000 km and 600 km from the Earth, and that the parent coment was a billion tonnes or more in size. They estimate a total of over 3,000 objects each of which was as large as the one that caused the Tunguska Event. If so, the Earth came very, very close to an extinction event that summer. (pictured: fragments of comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann) →

Null Entropy

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