What would happen if a meteor bigger than the earth hit the earth?

Answer 1

Just to begin; an asteroid IS going to hit the Earth. We just don't know WHEN. Or how big. Or how fast. The Earth has been hit before - MANY times before - and unless we humans intercept it, another will hit us. Probably not this year or next, but sometime within the next 100,000 years, an asteroid WILL intercept the Earth's orbit.

What will happen? That depends on how big it is, and how fast, and where it hits.

Answer 2

If a meteor bigger than Earth were to collide with our planet, it would likely result in a catastrophic event. The impact would release an incredible amount of energy, causing widespread destruction and potentially leading to mass extinction of life on Earth. The aftermath would include massive tsunamis, wildfires, earthquakes, and changes in the Earth's climate.

Answer 3

It would depend on the size of the impactor and where it hit. The Earth has been hit by very large rocks in the past; for example, a rock about 10 kilometers in size hit the Earth about 65 million years ago, wiping out most large animals such as the dinosaurs. There have been other mass extinctions; 250 million years ago, SOMETHING killed off about 95% of all life on Earth, and this also may have been a comet or asteroid.

In truth, tens of thousands of meteors hit the Earth each day, but most of them are the size of a grain of rice or smaller.

Answer 4

When the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 passed by the Sun in 1994, the tidal stress shattered the comet into a number of large fragments. Those fragments then smashed into Jupiter like a series of nuclear bombs in July, 1994. The biggest impact may have released an amount of energy equal to a thousand H-bombs.

Even though the first impact was slightly below the horizon on Jupiter from our point of view, the explosion was spectacular when viewed with telescopes here on Earth, and the Hubble Space Telescope. The impacts left enormous black blemishes in the clouds of Jupiter, and those blemishes were visible for months.

Had such a series of comet fragments hit the Earth, it most likely would have killed off all large animal species on Earth - including the species we call "man".

If you've ever wondered what the point of the space program is, it's so that when something like this DOES strike the Earth, there will be some humans living elsewhere - and we won't have, as the saying goes, all of our eggs in one basket. Because it WILL happen eventually.

Answer 5

The atmosphere causes small meteors to slow down and lose kinetic energy, which appears as heat which burns them away before they reach the ground. All we see uually is a shooting star.

An asteroid is too big for this to happen but they tend to have stable orbits which keep them away.

Answer 6

If the other body were bigger than the Earth, we would call it a "rogue planet", and the collision would ruin your ENTIRE day. And everybody else's.

We believe that another planet perhaps as large as Mars collided with the proto-Earth early in our planet's history; the debris from the collision formed the Moon.

Answer 7

As with any asteroid strike, a lot depends on mass and velocity. If the asteroid was the size of Alaska but was as dense as cotton wool, and impacted at a velocity of 10 miles per hour, Alaska would become the worlds largest producer of cotton wool.

In reality asteroids are a lot denser and hit the earth with much higher velocities.

Asteroids hit the Earth fairly frequently but most are destroyed in the upper astrosphere with as much force as the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was only 6 miles across, Alaska is 2,261 miles across - 377 times larger that the Chicxulub impact.

Needless to say, all life would be wiped out in an instant. The blast wave would sweep around the Earth, destroying everything in its path.

Answer 8

Nothing.

Depending on the size of the asteroid, the impact speed and the location of impact. A lot would depend on where you were. Generally, you and everyone else would die, either from the initial shock wave or from associated events preceding the event.

Asteroids with a diameter of about 5 -> 10 m hit the Earths atmosphere about once every year but are vaporised by the atmosphere with the power of a Hiroshima nuclear bomb.

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If you had enough advance notice (which would be unlikely; small asteroids are difficult to see!) it might be possible to flee. The only way to survive an asteroid impact is to be someplace else.

Answer 9

Such a thing is impossible. A large asteroid could potentially puncture the thinner parts of the crust and enter the mantle, but it would never make it anywhere near the core. Gas emissions from the mantle could alter the climate in such an event.

Answer 10

It would be the other way round: basically, the Earth would fall on the neutron star. Because of its much, much larger mass (about a million times larger than Earth), the neutron star would probably hardly be affected; but Earth would be utterly destroyed (and become part of the neutron star).