Gizmodo ran an awesome/frightening story today about the 2008 asteroid that collided with our planet. You can read the entirety of that article here, but the main point I want to get at is that we now know this asteroid was once home to numerous active volcanoes… while it’s streaking around the universe.
Asteroids by themselves are horrifying. Same goes with volcanoes. And if one or the other was supposedly responsible for wiping out dinosaurs (the most bad-a** residents of this planet), just imagine the kind of sh*tstorm a meteor plus volcanos would cause. Total overkill.
While we’re at it, Volcaneroid sounds like the kind of movie SyFy should air right after Sharktopus vs. Piranhaconda. Just saying.
And because you probably need this information, here’s a quick guide to the proper nouns for the flying space rocks that can kill you.
• Asteroid= A relatively small, inactive, rocky body orbiting the Sun.
• Comet= A relatively small, at times active, object whose ices can vaporize in sunlight forming an atmosphere (coma) of dust and gas and, sometimes, a tail of dust and/or gas.
• Meteoroid= A small particle from a comet or asteroid orbiting the Sun.
• Meteor= The light phenomena which results when a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporizes; a shooting star.
• Meteorite= A meteoroid that survives its passage through the Earth’s atmosphere and lands upon the Earth’s surface.
• Volcaneroid= A meteorite that NASA won’t tell you about because we’re all dead anyways.
