If a comet collided with Earth, the results could be disastrous — possibly meaning the end of all life on our planet. Comets can often be caught by the strong gravitational pulls of planets. In 1994, the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet crashed into Jupiter’s atmosphere. It impacted at more than 200,000km/h (124,000mph), creating balls of fire larger than Earth.
An impact event is a collision between astronomical objects causing measurable effects. Impact events have physical consequences and have been found to regularly occur in planetary systems, though the most frequent involve asteroids, comets or meteoroids and have minimal effect. When large objects impact terrestrial planets such as the Earth, there can be significant physical and biospheric consequences, though atmospheres mitigate many surface impacts through atmospheric entry. Impact craters and structures are dominant landforms on many of the Solar System’s solid objects and present the strongest empirical evidence for their frequency and scale.
Impact events appear to have played a significant role in the evolution of the Solar System since its formation. Major impact events have significantly shaped Earth’s history, have been implicated in the formation of the Earth-Moon system, the evolutionary history of life, the origin of water on Earth and several mass extinctions. The prehistoric Chicxulub impact, 66 million years ago, is believed to be the cause of the Cretaceous-Paleocene extinction event.
The Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact provided the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of Solar System objects, when the comet broke apart and collided with Jupiter in July 1994. An extrasolar impact was observed in 2013, when a massive terrestrial planet impact was detected around the star ID8 in the star cluster NGC 2547 by NASA’s Spitzer space telescope and confirmed by ground observations. Impact events have been a plot and background element in science fiction.
In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported “It’s 100 per cent certain we’ll be hit [by a devastating asteroid], but we’re not 100 per cent certain when.” Also in 2018, physicist Stephen Hawking, in his final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, considered an asteroid collision to be the biggest threat to the planet. In June 2018, the US National Science and Technology Council warned that America is unprepared for an asteroid impact event, and has developed and released the “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy Action Plan” to better prepare. According to expert testimony in the United States Congress in 2013, NASA would require at least five years of preparation before a mission to intercept an asteroid could be launched.
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