I read an interesting article in the newspaper the other day. Among other things it dealt with how we may have been saved from a cataclysm by our outer solar system. The huge gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter, may have acted as the Earth’s first line of defence against being bombarded by something really big. They act as interceptors, their huge gravities pulling some of these objects off course and into their dense atmospheres. Being so large they also present a tantalizing target.
You might remember that spectacular show some years back on Jupiter. Cometary fragments were bombarding the largest planet in our system. Had any one of those fragments hit Earth the results would have been nothing short of catastrophic.
That’s not to say that one cometary fragment might escape the pull of these huge planets and continue on a collision course with some of the smaller, interior planets. We see evidence that some of the inner planets have been hit by large objects. Even our moon has signs of earlier collisions.l And our Earth hasn’t escaped unscathed through the millennia. It’s just that our Earth has a way of erasing the outward signs of these disasters.
I didn’t set out to make this blog all doom and gloom. Maybe it was the constant thunder for awhile today that set me on this course. We can’t bury our heads in the sand hoping that we will continue to be missed. Twice yearly, when we pass through sections of the sky where miniscule debris litters our orbit, we’re reminded that things could go awry. The ‘Tears of St. Lawrence” may be romantic to watch but they’re also a wake-up call for funding programs that are in place now. These are programs that help to keep a watchful eye on near-Earth objects that could tumble off course and veer toward us.
We need to be ever vigilant when we look up to the stars at night. That’s if we can ever see the nighttime sky through our perpetual summer cloud cover! We need astronomers, both professional and amateur, to keep a close eye for potential dangers and chart their progress. That way we can be somewhat prepared in the event that one of these objects strays a little too close for comfort.
We’ve been lucky for some time now, but that could change in a heartbeat…
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Don Jackson
