{"id":7322,"date":"2010-02-01T14:00:30","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T14:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/terra-spots-an-impact-on-um-terra-bad-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2010-02-01T14:00:30","modified_gmt":"2010-02-01T14:00:30","slug":"terra-spots-an-impact-on-um-terra-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/terra-spots-an-impact-on-um-terra-bad-astronomy.php","title":{"rendered":"Terra spots an impact on, um, Terra | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

While high over the grasslands of Kazakhstan, the Terra Earth-observing satellite saw something interesting<\/a>… can you spot it in this image?<\/p>

\"terra_chiyli_lrg\"<\/a><\/p>

Not so easy, is it? But if you look just left of center you’ll see this:<\/p>

\"terra_chiyli\"<\/p>

See it there, right in the center? It’s the Chiyli impact crater, an ancient scar from a cosmic collision. The crater is roughly 1.5 km across (about a mile) — about the same size as Meteor Crater in Arizona — meaning the object that created it was something smaller than a football field, moving at perhaps 30 km\/sec (20 miles\/sec). It hit about 46 million years ago, give or take. Long after the dinosaurs, but long before us, too<\/a>. Note that it’s a double-rimmed crater too, which sometimes form in large impacts depending on the conditions of the impactor and the ground.<\/p>

This is a false-color image, at least part of which is in the infrared; vegetation appears red, water blue, and bare land is \"earth tones\" (browns and tans). This sort of imagery allows scientists to investigate how vegetation, land, and water change over time. <\/p>

\"terra_chiyli_flipped\"When I first saw this image, I didn’t see it as a crater, but more as a raised annulus, a ring in the ground. I knew immediately that this meant that in the picture, the sunlight was coming up from the bottom, and it turns out that’s correct. It’s a cool and optical illusion; when we see craters illuminated from below, they look like domes, and vice-versa<\/a>. In the picture here, I flipped the image and now, to me at least, it looks more like the depression that it really is. The wide inner rim is more obvious, too.<\/p>

<\/p>

Here’s an even better example:<\/p>

<\/p>
<\/td><\/td><\/tr>
Is it a dome…<\/td>… or a crater?<\/td><\/tr><\/table>

<\/p>

It just goes to show you that finding evidence of extra-terrestrial events on Earth can be tough, and even when you find them you can’t rest easy. They’re apt to fool you one way or another.<\/p>

<\/a>
<\/a><\/p>

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While high over the grasslands of Kazakhstan, the Terra Earth-observing satellite saw something interesting… can you spot it in this image?Not so easy, is it? But if you look just left of center you’ll see this:See it there, right in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7322"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}