Cosmic Collisions: Program Overview
A Comet Brushes Past Earth
Our exploration of cosmic collisions begins as a brilliant comet approaches Earth. As it passes, bits of rock from its glowing tail collide with Earth’s atmosphere, harmlessly burning up and creating a spectacular meteor shower above North America.
Our Moon is Created
We travel 4.5 billion years back in time to witness a Mars-sized object explosively crash into the young, cratered Earth. The collision releases a swirling mass of molten debris that circles Earth and, drawn together by gravity, forms our Moon in less than a month.
The Sun’s Powerful Energy
A 93-million-mile journey brings us searingly close to the Sun, inside which continuous collisions release incomprehensible amounts of energy in the form of light, fueling life on Earth. Riding the solar wind toward Earth, we see our planet’s magnetic field shield us from this powerful blast of charged particles, some of which spiral toward the magnetic poles causing the shimmering, glowing aurora borealis.
The End of the Dinosaurs
Not all collisions have beautiful and harmless results. Sixty-five million years ago, the Age of Dinosaurs came to an abrupt end when an enormous meteor collided with Earth, showering it with a global rain of debris that heated its atmosphere to oven-like temperatures. Three-quarters of all life on Earth was obliterated, but the impact cleared the way for the ancestors of humans to thrive.
Near Miss
Is Earth in danger of another catastrophic event? In any given year, chances are quite small that an asteroid of a few hundred meters in diameter will hit Earth, but scientists are working on strategies to avert just a catastrophe. One possible method is shown as a spacecraft uses gravity to shift an asteroid into a new orbit, diverting it from its collision course with Earth.
Stellar Collisions and Creations
Cosmic collisions are by no means limited to our own solar system. We venture outside the plane of the Milky Way galaxy and into a globular cluster, where stars are packed so densely together that a pair of stars will occasionally smash into each other, forming a single bright blue star.
The Galactic Merger
Accelerating billions of years into the future and half a million light years farther into space, we see the Milky Way gently spinning toward its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. In a graceful time-lapse—40 million years per second—they strike each other with a glancing blow, retreat, and come together again, merging to form one vast new galaxy. Without collisions like these, the Milky Way wouldn’t exist. And probably, neither would we.
Cosmic Collisions Presents Real Science in an Exciting Way
In order to understand the complex processes at work in the universe, astrophysicists make 3-D computer simulations using the laws of physics to examine what happens when collisions actually occur deep in space. This “simulation data” gathered from an international collection of researchers, is then translated into the spectacular, high-resolution scenes in Cosmic Collisions using supercomputers—a process known as “scientific data visualization.”
