Earth is safe as the 46-meter asteroid is set for flyby by next week

Meteorites injure hundreds in central Russia

Task 2. Can you decide if it’s true or false?

1 Nobody suffered at all.

2 A large meteor didn’t land in the region.

3 It was rather unusual.

4 All the injured were helped immediately.

5 No space objects burned up in the atmosphere.

6 There are no any nuclear wastes enterprises in the region.

7 Some people consider if it was a meteor or a new kind of weapon.

A meteor crashing in Russia's Ural Mountains has injured at least 950 people, as the shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings.

Most of those hurt, in the Chelyabinsk region where meteorites fell, suffered cuts and bruises but at least 46 remain in hospital.

A fireball streaked through the clear morning sky, followed by loud bangs.

President Vladimir Putin said he thanked God no big fragments had fallen in populated areas.

A large meteorite landed in a lake near Chebarkul, a town in Chelyabinsk region.

The meteor's dramatic passing was witnessed in Yekaterinburg, 200km (125 miles) to the north, and in Kazakhstan, to the south.

A huge line of smoke, like you get from a plane but many times bigger”

Eyewitness accounts.

"It was quite extraordinary," Chelyabinsk resident Polina Zolotarevskaya told BBC News. "We saw a very bright light and then there was a kind of a track, white and yellow in the sky."

"The explosion was so strong that some windows in our building and in the buildings that are across the road and in the city in general, the windows broke."

Officials say a large meteor partially burned up in the lower atmosphere, resulting in a number of meteorites falling earthwards.

Thousands of rescue workers have been dispatched to the area to provide help to the injured, the emergencies ministry said.

The Chelyabinsk region, about 1,500km (930 miles) east of Moscow, is home to many factories, a nuclear power plant and the Mayak atomic waste storage and treatment centre.

One Russian politician said the event was not a meteor shower but a US weapons test, Russia's Interfax news agency reported.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, was quoted as saying: "Meteors are falling. Those are not meteors, it is Americans testing their new weapon."

Earth is safe as the 46-meter asteroid is set for flyby by next week

Task3. Could you answer in details?

1 Who discovered the asteroid?

2 What could be the results of cosmic collision?

3 How close will the celestial body be to the Earth?

4 What were the consequences of a cosmic body fall in the 20th century?

5 What happened to our planet millions years ago?

Earth will definitely avoid a potential catastrophe as a 46-meter asteroid is to pass the planet from a safe, though remarkably close distance, said scientists from NASA.

The asteroid was discovered last year by Spanish astronomers and since then sparked fears of a possible cosmic collision that would have released the energy equivalent of 2.4 million tons of TNT and would have had the potential to wipe out 750 square miles if it did impact the Earth.

But scientists reassured the world on Thursday that there is no real threat.

“No Earth impact is possible,” said Donald Yeomans, a manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “No one has raised a red flag, nor will they,” Yeomans told reporters. “I certainly don’t anticipate any problems whatsoever.”

The celestial body, referred to as 2012 DA14, is projected to come as close as 27,520 km on February 15 – which is closer to our planet than the TV satellites that fly some 800 km higher. It will pass at a speed of 13 km per second.

It is the closest encounter with an object of its size since scientists began routinely monitoring asteroids about 15 years ago.

The last time the Earth was struck by a major cosmic body was in 1908, when an asteroid or comet exploded over Siberia, leveling 80 million trees over 2,150 square km.

"Although they wouldn't (cause) a global catastrophe if they impact the Earth, they still do a lot of regional destruction," said Lindley Johnson, who oversees the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA headquarters in Washington DC.

The asteroid will be invisible to the naked eye, appearing only as a small point of light even to those observing it by telescope. The prime viewing locations will be in Asia, Australia and Eastern Europe.

NASA adds that the flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close.

About 66 million years ago, a 10 km diameter asteroid smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, leading to the demise of the dinosaurs as well as most plant and animal life on the planet.

ET has more than 4 billion potential homes in Earth's 'back yard'

Task4. Could you share your opinion on this information?

Published: 08 February, 2013, 04:11

Extra-terrestrial life may be just around the corner from Earth, in astronomical terms, on one of possibly habitable 4.5 billion planets in the Milky Way, according to a new research.

Stars called red dwarfs may support planets on which life is possible. Six percent of red dwarfs in the galaxy have Earth-sized planets, which could be habitable, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have estimated.

Red dwarf are the most common stars in the Milky Way, which means that the closest earth like planet could be just 13 light years away, not far in space terms.

Red dwarfs are smaller, cooler and fainter than our Sun and are not visible from Earth to the naked eye. But despite their relative dimness, they make up three out of every four stars in our galaxy, a total of 75 billion.

“We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an earth-like planet. Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted,” said Courtney Dressing, an astronomer who presented the finding at a press conference Wednesday at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center in Massachusetts.

Dressing identified 95 planetary candidates orbiting red dwarf stars. According to the scientists’ estimates, 60 percent of red dwarfs could have planets orbiting them that could be smaller than Neptune.

Most were not quite the right temperature or size to be truly Earth-like, although three of the planets were warm and were approximately Earth-sized. Statistically therefore six percent of red dwarfs could have an Earth-like planet, scientists add.

“We don’t know for sure if life could exist on a planet orbiting a red dwarf, but the findings pique my curiosity and leave me wondering if the cosmic cradles of life are more diverse than we humans have imagined,” said Natalie Batalha, Kelper mission scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Locating these Earth-like planets would require a large network of ground based telescopes or a small space telescope, while follow up studies by the Giant Magellan Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope could tell us whether any of the planets had an atmosphere, the researchers said.

Red dwarf stars have a much longer life than Sun-like stars, meaning that life on a red dwarf orbiting planet might be much older than life on Earth.

“We might find an earth that’s 10 billion years old,” said David Charbonneau, co-author of the research.

Such a world would be different from our own. Because the planets orbit much closer to their stars, they may not have tides. But this wouldn’t necessarily prohibit life since they may also have a dense atmosphere or a deep ocean which could transport heat around the planet, the scientists said.

While young red dwarf stars emit flares of ultraviolet light, an atmosphere would protect life on the planet and help it evolve, the researchers claimed. “You don’t need an Earth clone to have life,” said Dressing.

The habitability of a planet is worked out by its distance from the star that it is orbiting and therefore whether it would have liquid water and a surface temperature which could sustain life. Liquid water is considered a major precondition to life.

The distance from a star where life is theoretically possible is known to astronomers as the ‘habitable zone’.

The astronomers used publically available data from NASA’s Kelper space telescope. Kelper is the first NASA mission capable of finding planets in or near the habitable zone.

This is not the first time that astronomers have found evidence that life may exist on planets orbiting red dwarfs. In March last year a French led team, from the European Southern Observatory in Chile, found out that 40% of red dwarf stars are orbited by planets 10 times bigger than Earth which are the correct distance away to support liquid water.

However, the French team gave a slightly contradictory conclusion that stellar eruptions and the emission of flares, which are common on red dwarfs and produce X- rays and ultraviolet radiation, would make life less likely on the orbiting planets.

But even if we do find alien life on these planets we won’t be able to pay a visit. The closest suitable red dwarfs are 13 light years away, way beyond our space travelling means, although they’re virtually next-door neighbors by space standards.

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