Thursday, March 11, 2010

'Terminator' Asteroids Could Re-Form After Nuke

You'll need a big bomb to keep us apart (Image: Adastra/Taxi/Getty)

From New Scientist:

THE regenerating liquid-metal robots in the Terminator movies have a cosmic relation: incoming asteroids that quickly reassemble if blasted by a nuclear bomb.

If a sizeable asteroid is found heading towards Earth, one option is to nuke it. But too small a bomb would cause the fragments to fly apart only slowly, allowing them to clump together under their mutual gravity. Simulations now show this can happen in an alarmingly short time.

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