Space can be a scary place, every single day of our lives we have some sort of force of nature trying to kill us. In August of 1883 Jose Bonilla, a Mexican Astronomer spotted hundreds of objects passing in front of the sun. The objects were very fuzzy and almost cloud like as he saw them passing by his telescope. A new analysis of the observations that were made by Bonill suggests that what he saw was actually a billion to a trillion tons of comet passing by the Earth as close as a 400 miles from the surface of the Earth.
Bonilla had no idea that he was looking at a comet, all he knew is that for a period of about two days, in a couple of hours he saw about 450 fuzzy objects pass through his telescope. Since he was the only astronomer who saw this, he published a paper in the astronomical journal a few years after the sighting. The Journal’s editor stated that Bonilla accidentally counted birds or bugs and disregarded the article. In reality, Bonilla was the only astronomer that spotted the closest successful attempt at nature achieving the ultimate goal of complete annihilation. What Bonilla saw was the remnants of a comet that narrowly missed the Earth and completely destroyed life as we know it. The reason that no body saw it is because the comet came by to close to the Earth that no one was focusing their telescopes to the narrow distance. Everyone else was looking out miles and miles out into space. Bonilla was the only one that was looking in that general direction, but it was so close to the Earth that his telescope didn’t have the resolution to focus to an object that close.
Astronomers used the numbers that were collected by Bonilla and came up that the original size of the comet was about nine trillion tons before it broke up and split into over 3000 different fragments. Keep in mind that Bonilla counted 450+ different pieces ranging the size of 450 feet to a mile across in a few hours of work over a period of two days. The astronomers took 450 pieces in a few hours and added them to each hour of the day for two days and came up with the conclusion that there were over 3000 pieces. He didn’t see all of it.
Just so you can get an idea of what the heck an asteroid fragment 450 feet wide can do to the earth, the crater in Arizona happened about 50,000 years ago. The Meteor Crater is nearly one mile across, 2.4 miles in circumference and more than 550 feet deep. The asteroid fragment that did this to the earth was about 150 feet wide. Closer to our time, in 1908, there was another asteroid impact that was about 200 feet wide, the impact destroyed over 80 million trees and the explosion of the impact was the equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb.
Now, imagine having 3000 nuclear bomb impacts all over the world and for the first time Nature would be killing us with the equivalent of a nuclear holocaust. The only reason we’re alive today is because the comet went on the perfect trajectory. Had it been less than 1 degree on the direction of the Earth and we would of been history, had it broken up at a different time, as little as one year in difference, and the pieces would of impacted the Earth, even something like a solar storm could have caused the fragments to impact the Earth or if the comet was was traveling at a slower speed. There were hundreds of variables that took place and ended up lining up perfectly.
via MIT
