Have you ever seen one of those movies where a massive asteroid hits Earth? The crazy thing is that this did happen in the past. You probably know about the dino-killing asteroid, but I’m talking about something bigger, way bigger. This story describes what happened when it hit Earth, what would happen if one hit Earth today, and what would happen if it got too close to Earth.
I know what you’re probably thinking, “ wait so you mean a planet hit Earth?” And the answer would be most likely. Some scientists hypothesize that a planet, a bit smaller than Earth or about the size of Mars, hit Earth in the past. It hit Earth when they were both still basically just oceans of lava. Because they were in this phase the smaller planet didn’t make a massive crater in the planet, instead they basically combined kinda like how if you drop a small drop of water into a puddle. They didn’t just combine though, some debris flew out and formed a ring around Earth for a while, eventually the cooled down and combined together to form the moon.
But what would happen if that same planet hit Earth tomorrow? Well, to put it short, the same thing would happen. But you already know that, so I’m going to describe what I think would happen minute by minute. So, the first thing that would happen would probably be everyone is just watching it because scientists would probably know years in advance. Immediately after it hit the Earth, people on the other side would feel a devastatingly big earthquake strong enough to bring whole skyscrapers down. Right after that, a massive fireball would take place burning everything in its path. The shockwave would probably stretch all across the world, probably wiping out everything we know today. At the same time, the Earth might be thrown out of orbit to who knows where. This would mean that the Earth might get closer to the sun and heat up, or if it got further away it’d get colder.
And finally, what would happen if the planet came dangerously close to Earth? Just like if it were to hit us we’d know for a long time in advance. But in this scenario, we got lucky and it missed us. But how lucky actually? Just because the planet didn’t hit us, doesn’t mean it didn’t do anything. In the first situation, it might have been far enough away to not affect Earth itself, but it might just take the moon with it because its gravitational pull pulled the moon in. But by taking the moon it could throw off the Earth’s axis by 10-45 degrees! That would wreak havoc on all the seasons and climates. But in the second situation, it gets too close to Earth and takes us with it, knocking us out of orbit and likely making us a rogue planet. This would be really bad because without the sun we’d get almost no light and little to no heat. Meaning we’d all freeze to death, no matter where we were.
So overall it’d be disastrous if a planet hit us or had a near miss with us. If the world ends, either by a giant fireball or by freezing, both would be bad. A fun fact about the planet that hit us in the past; if it didn’t hit us, it would be in the habitable zone so it would probably have life on it like Earth. Here is one of the movie scenes I was talking about in the beginning- Don’t Look Up