Loud explosions in Hampton Roads area, page 5

Originally posted by XD9611
there sure has been alot of meteoric displays over the past year or so, hope its not a precursor to a larger event

There will always be "blips" in activity, since the way asteroids "get kicked in our direction" is a fairly random process. That's just nature...

There is also always something big in the pipeline that will come our way sooner or later, but without decades/centuries of accurate data (even now we can not see the whole picture), we cant really say if there is a trend towards anything "bigger".

However there is evidence that we may from time to time encounter certain meteoroid streams that contain many large fragments, the Taurids for example.

On the other hand, while the orbits of some particles are quite dispersed, it is still likely that the Taurid stream has a narrow and dense core consisting of particles concentrated near the orbit of the stream's parent object, which is presumably related to Comet 2P/Encke. As the orbits of the material constituting this narrow, dense core have been subject to perturbations over thousands of years, it may be inferred that intense bombardment episodes have resulted at epochs when the material reaches Earth intersection. Dynamical calculations show that, as a Taurid-like orbit precesses, the northern daytime intersection occurs just a little (a few centuries) before the southern nighttime one, and the southern daytime one just before the northern nighttime one. That is, the four intersections occur in two pairs, and the influx of material to Earth is enhanced during epochs lasting a few centuries and spaced by a few millennia. The term "coherent catastrophism" has been used by astronomers at Armagh and elsewhere to describe the idea that there are strong patterns in the influx of extraterrestrial material to Earth.

There was this recently too:
Thousands of unseen dark comets may be on collision course with Earth, warn experts

Having said all that, we are still here today, and Earth has survived some fairly extreme impacts in the past. Big impacts are few and far between, and usually only cause local effects. Our atmosphere does a good job as stopping even fairly large asteroids up to about 5+ meters across.

Objects which are in the 10-50m size range (at the upper end of this range an asteroid might destroy/cripple a major city or a very small country), are thankfully very rare, and still larger ones than that (50-100m) which are capable of devastating a large part of a continent and having global consequences, are so rare, that there may only have been one or two in the last 10,000 years (take that figure as an educated guess, since I have not looked in to the frequency of past major impacts very deeply at all).

Basically, the asteroids that we have been seeing of late, are within the 5m range, between the size of a car and a small truck, and they have all disintegrated at many km altitude (probably 40km +), raining down small pebbles on the ground below...

No point in worrying about it, just hope that you get to see the next one and enjoy the show

If you want to help, write to your senator/MP urging him/her to increase funding for NEO research.

[edit on 30-3-2009 by C.H.U.D.]