Please tell me this is some bad joke!

[Mirac Honorguard]

hmm, I read something that these astoroids things happen alot actually. Its just not told to the outside world. Also, alot of them missed earth.
Heh, and for those that survive and are happy about it, just lemme tell you most astoroids carry new life-forms, usually very small ones, like virus-size

[frudi_x]

well, black holes are somewhat off-topic here, but no matter [img]smile.gif[/img]
actually, unless i've missed some big discovery lately, mini-black holes are only being theorised on for now, as there is no real mechanisem known to explain their creation. the black holes that more or less certainly exist are the remains of massive stars that end their lives in a supernova explosion. when nuclear reactions in the star's core stop, the core collapses under it's own gravitational pull until not even light can escape it's immense gravity. the 'point of no return', beyond which escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, is the event horizon and that is what is usually referred to as the size of the black hole. so the 'radius' of a black hole the mass of a few sun's masses is actually a few kilometers.
there are probably also black holes in the centers of most galaxies, those have masses on the order of millions of times the mass of our sun and are about the size of our solar system.

p.s., just to comment on what Mirac wrote...
indeed, there really are quite a lot of bodies a few meters in size hiting our planet, but these bodies are weak enough to break up very high up in the atmosphere, so the explosions they cause aren't a threat to us. and i'm not talking firecracker-type explosions here, rather think 'little boy' or 'fat man' size explosions! all thanks to our precious atmosphere that guards us from yet another cosmic danger [img]smile.gif[/img] .
as for the near misses - iirc there was an asteroid some 300 meters across that a few years ago missed the earth by only about 50.000 or 100.000 kilometers! that is incredibly close (the moon is on average 386.000 kilemeters away) and an asteroid this size could easily devastate an entire continent.

[ 09-02-2003, 05:51 PM: Message edited by: frudi_x ]

[Darlon]

sorry for bringing this kind of topic here, its just that I was so shocked by this discovery.

First the war on terrorisom, and now this.

The world is a cruel place .

[Bozos of Bones]

In 1999 a huge (2.5 kilometers across) missed the earth due to the unexpected gravity field of the strange position of Saturn at the time. It completely missed our star system, but before that happened astrologists believed it to be a 1 in 650000 chance to hit our planet. Scarry stuff, kids.

[Gangrell]

An asteroid isn't going to hit the earth, I've heard about so many from the Discovery Channel that such and such is going to smack into the Earth. They don't know if it will or not.

[Sir Goulum]

I *really* doubt that that beast is gonna hit us. [img]tongue.gif[/img] And if it does, the last thing I'll be doing, probably is gonna be chatting on MSN with a friend(if it is still around)

[johnny]

I'm not worried, we still have Bruce Willis.

[Lord Lothar]

Originally posted by johnny: I'm not worried, we still have Bruce Willis.

Nah, he's getting too old for this kind of action.

[Kakero]

don't worry, by that time some powerful nation on Earth would have created a powerful weapon to blow that thing sky high.

[Gangrell]

Originally posted by Kakero: don't worry, by that time some powerful nation on Earth would have created a powerful weapon to blow that thing sky high.

Poor lad, did you not watch Armageddon?