Defining the News
Humanity could use a nuclear bomb to deflect a massive, life-threatening asteroid hurtling towards Earth in the future, according to scientists who tested the theory in the laboratory by blasting X-rays at a marble-sized “mock asteroid”.
In the movie, Bruce Willis and a plucky team of drillers save Earth from an asteroid 1,000 kilometres wide — roughly the size of Texas. The machine is capable of generating “the brightest flash of X-rays in the world using 80 trillion watts of electricity”, Sandia’s Nathan Moore, the lead study author, told AFP.
The biggest asteroids are the easiest to detect ahead of time, so “this approach could be quite viable” even for asteroids the size of the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub, Moore said. Testing out the theory using a real nuke would be dangerous, hugely expensive — and banned by international treaties.The largest uncertainty right now is that asteroids can “come in many flavours”, Moore said.For example, the asteroid hit by DART, Dimorphos, turned out to be a loosely held-together pile of rubble.
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