• The much-anticipated meteor shower kicking off season four of "Fortnite" has arrived.
• The meteor shower has reshaped the main island, altering some regions and (bizarrely) adding a few new ones.
• Season four's arrival was teased by a meteor that appeared in the sky above the game's island, driving players to speculate about what would happen.

It's finally here: The meteors have crashed in "Fortnite," launching the fourth season of the game and fundamentally reshaping the geography of its main island.

Where there was once no massive crater in the ground, there now is.

Moreover, the site of the meteor crashes has a new item scattered about that when consumed enables players to bounce around in low gravity. They're called hop rocks. Of course they are.

Here's a short video of the new items in action, courtesy of Kotaku: 

Most significantly, the main map of "Fortnite: Battle Royale" has changed pretty dramatically.

What was once Dusty Depot, a set of buildings smack in the center of the island, is now Dusty Divot, a crater. And where there previously was no drive-in movie theater area named Risky Reels, there now is (in the upper right corner of the map).

Of course, beyond the major geographical changes as a result of the meteors, there's a new season of "Fortnite"— the most popular game in the world, by some measures— for millions of players to dig into. People who buy the "battle pass" get a ton of new challenges that unlock a ton of new in-game stuff, from gliders to skins to emotes.

Check out the trailer for season four of "Fortnite":

SEE ALSO: A 13-year-old boy has become the youngest professional player of the hit game Fortnite

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NOW WATCH: This conveyor belt can move in any direction

• An asteroid the size of the Statue of Liberty is set to pass within half a moon's distance of Earth on Tuesday evening.
• The asteroid, dubbed 2010 WC9, will come closer to our planet than any asteroid of its size has in 100 years.
• Luckily, this asteroid won't hit our planet or cause any damage. 

An asteroid the size of the Statue of Liberty is set to narrowly miss Earth on Tuesday evening. 

The asteroid, dubbed 2010 WC9, will come closer to our planet than any asteroid of its size has in the last 100 years. But don't worry: It will only reach 126,419 miles away from Earth around 6:05 p.m. ET on Tuesday, or about half the distance from here to the Moon.

While you won't be able to see it with your naked eye, scientists are actively monitoring the asteroid's path with radar and powerful telescopes. 

The asteroid was first identified in 2010, though it quickly vanished into space, Patrick Taylor, a scientist at the Universities Space Research Association at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, told Business Insider.

Here's a GIF of the actual asteroid, courtesy of Slooh:

The asteroid is estimated to be 200 to 400 feet across, according to NASA, making it the largest asteroid to come this close to Earth in hundreds of years. 

The asteroid was "rediscovered" in recent days, and "and found to be making a very close fly-by of Earth," Taylor said. 

"The case of 2010 WC9 goes to show that simply detecting a new asteroid is not enough to determine if it will be a future threat to Earth," Taylor added. 

Paul Chodas, the manager of The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Business Insider his team was "quite surprised" when astronomers spotted the asteroid again last week.

"The surprising thing was how close it will approach today, basically as close as it can ever get. But, again, we already knew that this asteroid could not collide with us," Chodas said. 

The asteroid's close fly-by towards Earth will give scientists a unique opportunity to get more data about the asteroid's physical properties, like size, spin rate, and composition, Chodas said.

Scientists are hard at work monitoring asteroids, or near-Earth Objects (NEOs), that may pose a threat to our planet, Business Insider's Dave Mosher reports. 

In 2013, a 65-foot wide asteroid smacked into Chelyabinsk, Russia, shattering windows and destructing structures in the surrounding area. 

Last year, an asteroid between 50 and 111 feet wide came within half a moon's distance of our planet. Another much larger asteroid, dubbed 2002 AJ129, came within 2.6 million miles of Earth in January. 

Fortunately, there's no real danger of WC9 hitting the Earth. Even if it did smack into our planet, it likely wouldn't spell the end of it — but it could cause some serious damage to the impact zone.

A 45-meter or 150-foot asteroid exploded over Tunguska, Russia in 1908 — in what is known as the Tunguska Event — and wiped out an area roughly the size of New York City. 

Statistically, Tunguska event-like asteroids strike Earth about once every 100 to 200 years.

This story was updated with new comments after publication. 

SEE ALSO: City-killing asteroids will inevitably strike Earth — but NASA isn't launching this mission to hunt them down

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NOW WATCH: How NASA saved the world

• NASA and US government agencies have released plans for dealing with Near Earth Objects.
• The plan outlines options for deflection and disruption.
• A disruption plan raises the possibility of using nuclear weapons.

The US has an official strategy for dealing with Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that threaten the planet — and yes, it involves nukes.

You might know them as "asteroids", or "comets", but rocks and balls of ice and gas aren't the only objects that could potentially destroy a chunk of life on Earth.

There's more detail on what an NEO is in the 20-page report prepared for the White House to look at, along with things like "procedural actions", "international cooperation" and "computational tools".

But for now, let's cut straight to Goal 3 — "Develop Technologies for NEO Deflection and Disruption Missions".

There are really only two options — deflection and disruption.

"Multiple technologies may be suitable for preventing NEO impacts that are predicted well in advance," the report states.

"While disruption via nuclear explosive device may be the only feasible option for NEOs that are very large or come with short warning time."

Here are the technologies the White House is considering:

• Concepts for rapid response NEO reconnaissance missions. Including "mission concepts in which the reconnaissance spacecraft could also carry out deflection or disruption".
• International launch vehicle infrastructure to support planetary defense missions. Including "processes for accomplishing rapid response planetary defense space-lift".
• Identify technologies required to prevent NEO impacts. This is the one which includes "kinetic impactors, nuclear devices, and gravity tractors for deflection, and nuclear devices for disruption".

Let's stop there, at "kinetic impactors, nuclear devices and gravity tractors".

A kinetic impactor is simply smashing a spacecraft into the NEO in the hopes of deflecting it. A nuclear device is obviously your straightforward, "call Bruce Willis" case scenario.

The gravity tractor is something NASA is a couple of years away from testing. It performs a little bit like this:

Back in 2016, NASA announced its plan to target the 400-metre wide asteroid 2008 EV5 in 2021 with the gravity tractor technology.

Another important part of its mission, which the NEO white paper alludes to, is to grab a boulder off the surface of EV5:

Because if we're going to blow up asteroids, it's important to know exactly what it's made of.

Best of all, we might not have to wait for a Armageddon-sized asteroid to threaten us before we get to blow it up. The White House paper also makes sure to mention that test runs on harmless NEOs are essential to make sure this type of action will work.

It will, obviously, cost billions. 

But what are the chances of a decent ROI on all that spending and cooperation?

For one, the NEO white paper mentions that any asteroid exploration and material testing can be done in partnerships with private industry, because asteroids can potentially be worth trillions.

Fortunately for private industrialists, in 2015, US Congress passed the SPACE Act, giving US space firms the rights to own and sell natural resources they mine from bodies in space.

But NASA has often referred to the fact there is "no record in modern times of any person being killed by a meteorite" and that even an asteroid 1.5 kilometres across only hits the Earth every million or so years.

"In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years," it says.

Here are a couple of reasons why the need for an official response playbook has escalated in the past few years. For starters, this is the damage an object the size of the Tunguska object could inflict on New York:

The object that exploded over Tunguska and destroying 2,000 square kilometres of forest was 40-60 metres across.

The asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia with the power of 20-30 atomic bombs, damaging 7,200 buildings and injuring 1,500 people, was just 20 metres across.

Here's the rise in NEOs we've spotted larger than 140 metres since US Congress directed NASA to really start properly looking for them in 2005. We're up to 18,000 on just 3,500 since then:

NASA estimates there are over 10 million NEOs larger than the Chelyabinsk asteroid, and 300,000 objects larger than 40 metres, "that could pose an impact hazard and would be very challenging to detect more than a few days in advance".

The big ones — larger than one kilometre across — are those that have the potential to severely disrupt life on Earth as we know it.

The dinosaurs found out the hard way 65 million years ago when a 10-kilometre asteroid hit the Yucatan peninsula.

But NASA says it's found and catalogued almost all of those, and none are on a collision course with Earth.

NASA's NEOWISE survey, for example, has been tracking, and improved its ability to track, asteroids for four years now:

That's where the other half of the report is focused — on improving tracking methods, data processing and processes for identifying hazardous asteroids and the best way to deal with them.

Because while we are close to 100% certain that no extinction-level asteroids we've spotted are on a collision course with Earth, we're not 100% sure we've spotted all the extinction-level asteroids.

As the NEO report admits, there is some chance that "large comets from the outer solar system could appear and impact the Earth with warning times as short as a few months".

SEE ALSO: NASA is searching an ocean volcano to find alien life on other moons

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NOW WATCH: Why Rolex watches are so expensive

• Credible reports of a meteor exploding with 2.1 kilotons of force above a US Air Force early-warning radar at Thule Air Base in Greenland have surfaced.
• The Air Force has been silent on the event.
• Data from NASA shows a record of an object of unspecified size traveling at 24.4 kilometers per second (about 54,000 mph, or Mach 74) almost directly over Thule, Greenland. 

A curious and credible tweet from the director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, Hans Kristensen, on Wednesday at 5:14 p.m. ET said: "Meteor explodes with 2.1 kilotons force 43 km above missile early warning radar at Thule Air Base."

That tweet apparently originated from a tweet on Tuesday afternoon by "Rocket Ron," whose profile says they're a "Space Explorer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory." The original tweet said: "A fireball was detected over Greenland on July 25, 2018 by US Government sensors at an altitude of 43.3 km. The energy from the explosion is estimated to be 2.1 kilotons."

The incident is fascinating for a long list of reasons, not least of which is how the Air Force integrates the use of social media reporting (and non-reporting) into its official flow of information. As of this writing, no reporting about any such event appears on the public news website of the 12th Space Warning Squadron based at Thule, the 21st Space Wing, or the wing's 821st Air Base Group that operates and maintains Thule Air Base in support of missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite command-and-control operations missions.

Data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows a record of an object of unspecified size traveling at 24.4 kilometers per second (about 54,000 mph, or Mach 74) at 76.9 degrees north latitude, 69.0 degrees west longitude, on July 25 at 11:55 p.m. That latitude and longitude checks out as almost directly over Thule, Greenland.

According to NASA, its Near-Earth Object program database for objects entering the atmosphere shows that: "The data indicate that Earth's atmosphere was impacted by small asteroids, resulting in a bolide (or fireball), on 556 separate occasions in a 20-year period. Almost all asteroids of this size disintegrate in the atmosphere and are usually harmless." That is a rate of one asteroid, or "bolide,"every 13 days over the 20-year study.

But there are exceptions.

You may recall the sensational YouTube and social media videos of the very large Chelyabinsk meteor that struck the earth on February 15, 2013. Luckily, it entered the Earth's atmosphere at a shallow trajectory and largely disintegrated. Had it entered at a more perpendicular angle, it might have struck the Earth with significantly greater force. Scientists report that Chelyabinsk was the largest meteor to hit the Earth in the modern recording period, over 60 feet (20 meters) in diameter. Over 7,000 buildings were damaged and about 1,500 people were injured in the incident.

What is perhaps most haunting about the Chelyabinsk meteor — and perhaps, we may learn, this most recent Greenland incident — is that there was no warning (at least, not publicly). No satellites in orbit detected the Chelyabinsk meteor, and no early-warning system knew it was coming, according to scientists. Because the radiant or origin of the Chelyabinsk meteor was out of the sun, it was difficult to detect in advance. It arrived with total surprise.

Northern Russia seems to be a magnet for titanic meteor strikes. The Tunguska event of 1908 was a meteor that struck in the Krasnoyarsk Krai region of Siberia. It flattened over 770 square miles of Siberian taiga forest but curiously seems to have left no crater, suggesting it likely disintegrated entirely about 6 miles above the Earth. The massive damage done to the taiga forest was from the shockwave of the object entering the atmosphere prior to disintegration. While this recent Greenland event is very large, at 2.1 kilotons (2,100 tons of TNT) of force for the explosion, the Tunguska event is estimated to have been as large as 15 megatons (15 million tons of TNT).

It will be interesting to see how (and if) popular news media and the official defense news outlets process this recent Greenland incident. But while we wait to see how the media responds as the Twitter dust settles, it's worth at least a minor exhale knowing this is another big object that missed hitting the Earth in a different location at a different angle and potentially with a different outcome.

SEE ALSO: Russia just showed off a potentially world-ending nuclear 'doomsday' torpedo that the US can't stop

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NOW WATCH: The CEO of one of the largest health insurers in the US explains the problem with healthcare in America

Why are meteor showers like the Perseids so common? Turns out, space isn’t as empty as you might think. It’s littered with debris that forms those spectacular meteor shower we look forward to each year. Following is a transcript of the video.

Solar eclipses are rare and you can never predict when an aurora will illuminate the sky. But there's one cosmic light show we can always count on. Meteor showers. They happen around the same time each year and have been doing so for centuries. But despite their brilliance and beauty it doesn't take much to make a meteor shower. You just need three ingredients, the sun, Earth and a comet.

Comets have been around since the dawn of our solar system over four-and-a-half billion years ago. They formed out of the same disc of gas and dust that created earth and the other seven planets. And like the other planets they too orbit the sun but that's where the similarities end. Most planets orbit the sun on fairly circular orbits whereas comets take a more elliptical path through our solar system. Check out Halley's Comet for example. Right now it's beyond the orbit of the furthest planet Neptune. But over the next 50 years it will travel about three billion miles toward the inner reaches of our solar system. Eventually flying past Earth in the year 2061.

And it's encounters like this that make meteor showers possible. Because as a comet approaches the inner solar system, the sun's radiation heats up ice under the surface and as that ice turns to a vapor it generates powerful outbursts of gas and dust, sometimes ejecting hundreds of tons of material into space per second. The result is a brilliant stream of debris called the comet tail or coma, which can stretch hundreds to thousands of miles across. In fact, space is littered with comet tail debris that our planet passes through each year. And when that happens, the debris strikes our atmosphere at over 100,000 miles an hour, incinerating the four-and-a-half billion year old fragments in seconds. This produces brilliant flashes of light that we call a meteor shower.

Now some meteor showers are more spectacular than others, giving us anywhere from a few to over a hundred meteors an hour. And even the same meteor shower can vary from year to year. It all depends on how much debris we scoop up as we pass through the tail. Regardless, comet tails tend to follow the same path as the comet itself, which means they pass through the same spot along Earth's orbit. That's why we get the same meteor showers around the same time each year. At the end of October for example, we pass through the tale of Halley's Comet which gives us the Orionids meteor shower. And every August, we pass through comet Swift-Tuttle's tail which we see as the Perseids meteor shower. But it's not just October and August, meteor showers occur year-round. So check your calendar to see when the next one will be coming to a sky near you.

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• If an asteroid were to head toward Earth in the foreseeable future, we would be quite defenseless.
• To change that, NASA has approved a mission to throw a "small" asteroid off course in October 2022.
• The aim of the project is to establish whether we can protect our planet from a future asteroid impact.

If an asteroid were to head toward Earth, we would be quite defenseless, as we have not successfully developed a method that could reduce — or entirely avert — the impact of a devastating collision.

However, that may be about to change. NASA has approved a project called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the aim of which is to throw a "small" asteroid off course in October 2022.

The asteroid in question, informally known as Didymoon, is a moon asteroid about 150 meters tall. It's part of a double asteroid system — named after the Greek word for twins, Didymos — in which it orbits another 800-meter asteroid about a kilometer away.

The European Space Agency is also involved in the mission

When DART is launched, it will be powered by a solar-electric-propulsion system and will eventually collide with Didymoon. 

The spacecraft will also be accompanied by a European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft called Hera, which will be largely responsible for collating data about the asteroid — however, according to Space, it won't be on-site during the impact, but it will be present afterward.

Read more:NASA found rare, extraterrestrial meteorite fragments in the ocean

According to the ESA, when Hera launches, it will be accompanied by two small CubeSats — nanosatellites no larger than a cereal package — that will record additional data, such as the gravitational field and the internal structure of the asteroid.

The two satellites will be released around the asteroids and will land on the two space rocks.

The asteroid's orbit will be redirected with the kinetic impactor technique

"DART would be NASA's first mission to demonstrate what's known as the kinetic impactor technique — striking the asteroid to shift its orbit — to defend against a potential future asteroid impact," Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

The idea is that the DART spacecraft, which weighs in at about 500 kilograms, will hit the asteroid at 6 kilometers per second, changing its orbital velocity around Didymos by approximately 0.4 millimeters per second. This may sound like a negligible figure, but the reorientation will be substantial enough to be measured from Earth with telescopes.

Read also: The White House is considering nuking asteroids, according to a NASA report

"DART is a critical step in demonstrating we can protect our planet from a future asteroid impact," said Andy Cheng, who works at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and coleads the DART investigation. "Since we don’t know that much about their internal structure or composition, we need to perform this experiment on a real asteroid. With DART, we can show how to protect Earth from an asteroid strike with a kinetic impactor by knocking the hazardous object into a different flight path that would not threaten the planet."

Here's an animation of what the probe's impact may look like.

The launch of the mission is scheduled to take place between December 2020 and May 2021.

SEE ALSO: Japanese rovers just transmitted the first photos from an asteroid 280 million kilometres away

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NOW WATCH: NASA has a $3.5 billion idea to save Earth from a supervolcano apocalypse

• A meteoroid struck the moon during the super blood wolf lunar eclipse on January 20 and 21.
• The Griffith Observatory's live feed showed the quick, bright strike, which can be seen at the below video's 3:43:10 mark.
• The meteoroid impact likely left a crater on the moon's surface.

The dramatically named "super blood wolf moon eclipse" of Jan. 20 and 21 was a sight to behold all on its own. Then, some sharp-eyed telescope observers noticed a flash of extracurricular activity when a meteoroid created a bright pinpoint of light on the lunar surface.

Multiple telescope feeds captured the impact, which likely left behind a fresh crater on the pockmarked moon.

A livestream feed from Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles shows the flash, which happened at the height of the eclipse. 

Read more: 19 amazing facts about the moon

The MIDAS Survey, which monitors moon impacts, confirmed the touchdown and says it was produced by a meteoroid that hit the lunar ground.

The moon has earned its craters. Our space neighbor lacks an atmosphere like we have on Earth, so rocks don't burn up on approach. Even a small meteoroid can create a bright flash when it hits the lunar surface. 

Lunar impacts are common, but what makes this one so fun is the sheer number of telescopes turned toward the moon for eclipse observations. 

The brief blast may have eluded most viewers at the time it happened, but we can now look back through the footage and spot the shining moment when a meteoroid landed during an epic eclipse.

• Read more on space:
• NASA will attempt to knock an asteroid out of orbit for the first time in 2022
• Watch the moon get pounded by 1 billion years' worth of big asteroids in a 1-minute animation
• A satellite that will make sparkling 'meteor showers' in the sky on demand is getting its first test
• A dead moon may have created Saturn's famous rings after dinosaurs on Earth went extinct — making the rings younger than scientists previously thought

Visit INSIDER's homepage for more.

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NOW WATCH: A city in China wants to launch an artificial moon into orbit by 2020 — here's what would happen if Earth really did have two moons

• A gigantic meteor blew up in the Earth's atmosphere with ten times the force of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb in December, but went largely unnoticed until now, according to NASA.
• NASA said that a meteor exploded above the Bering Sea, off the coast of Russia, in December last year.
• Meteors impacts this large are rare on earth, and tend to come only two or three times every 100 years.  

A gigantic meteor blew up in the Earth's atmosphere with ten times the force of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb in December, but went largely unnoticed until now, according to NASA.

NASA said it initially missed the fireball because it exploded far from land over the Bering Sea, off the Russian Peninsula, BBC News reported. The US Air Force notified the space program after military satellites picked up the meteor last year. 

Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary defense officer, told the BBC meteors this large are rare, and tend to come only two or three times every 100 years.  

The blast, which occurred on December 18, was one of the largest of its kind in the last 30 years, second only to the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, six years ago. The 2013 fireball was the size of a six-story building and injured about 1,200 people with its impact. 

Read more:Stunning new details from the largest asteroid impact in a century

The latest meteor exploded 15.9 miles (25.6km) above the Earth's surface, and had an impact energy of 173 kilotons, according to the BBC. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II had an energy of around 15 kilotons.

Kelly Fast, near-Earth objects observations program manager at NASA, told the BBC it had about 40% of the energy release of Chelyabinsk.

"But it was over the Bering Sea so it didn't have the same type of effect or show up in the news," she said. "That's another thing we have in our defense, there's plenty of water on the planet."

Incidents like the one in the Bering Sea have scientists looking for new ways to monitor and predict when a meteor will collide with Earth. A mission concept is currently developing a space-based telescope called NeoCam to support ground-based observatories.

Dr. Amy Mainzer, chief scientist on NeoCam at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the BBC that the telescope could discover asteroids larger than 459 feet (140 meters) from a gravitational point in space.

Without the mission, it could "take us many decades to get there with the existing suite of ground-based surveys," she said.

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NOW WATCH: The unsettling reasons no one saw the Chelyabinsk meteor over Russia coming — and why it could happen again

• NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called on people to take the threat of a meteor crashing into Earth seriously.
• "We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood. It's not about movies," Bridenstine told a conference on Monday.
• He noted that a meteor exploded over central Russia in 2013, damaging thousands of buildings and injuring more than 1,400 people.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

NASA's administrator warned that the threat of a meteor crashing into Earth is bigger than we might think.

Jim Bridenstine told the International Academy of Astronautics' Planetary Defense Conference on Monday that "the reason it's important for NASA to take this seriously is something you call the 'giggle factor,'" or scientific theories that seem too ridiculous to be likely.

"We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood. It's not about movies. This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know right now to host life, and that is the planet Earth," he added.

Bridenstine noted that in February 2013, a meteor measuring 20 meters (about 65 feet) in diameter and traveling at 40,000 mph entered Earth's atmosphere and exploded over Chelyabinsk, in central Russia.

Read more: NASA found rare, extraterrestrial meteorite fragments in the ocean

Meteorites — smaller pieces broken from the larger meteor — crashed in the region, and a fireball streaked through the sky, the BBC reported at the time.

There was a loud, massive blast that caused a shock wave that broke windows and damaged buildings across the region, Bridenstine said, adding that the meteor's explosion had 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

More than 1,400 people were injured. Many were hit by flying glass, CNN reported.

"I wish I could tell you that these events are exceptionally unique, but they are not," Bridenstine said.

He said that NASA's modeling had found that such events will take place "about once every 60 years." He added that on the same day of the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion, another, larger asteroid came within 17,000 miles of Earth but narrowly missed.

Scientific experts at this week's Planetary Defense Conference are discussing how the world can defend against any potentially hazardous asteroid or comet that looks likely to hit Earth, the conference said in a statement.

In such a scenario, Bridenstine said, NASA would measure the object's speed and trajectory and decide whether to deflect it or evacuate the area that it would hit.

Watch Bridenstine's speech, starting at the 2:39 mark, in the video below:

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NOW WATCH: Here's what you actually see while you're watching a meteor shower

• NASA ran a terrifying simulation to see how it would prevent an asteroid from hitting the planet.
• Participants managed to deflect it but knocked a chunk off that headed toward New York.
• The fragment was just 165 to 260 feet wide (50 to 80 meters) but would create more energy than multiple nuclear bombs on impact, and the only way to keep people safe was to evacuate the entirety of New York City.
• NASA said this situation was unlikely, but the exercise was necessary to "help key decision makers practice for a real asteroid impact."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

NASA simulated the terrifying scenario of attempting to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth but in the process breaking off a fragment that hurtles toward New York and forces an evacuation of the entire city.

In an exercise at April's Planetary Defense Conference, participants from NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other federal agencies were given eight years to try and stop an asteroid from hitting Earth. But when NASA and space agencies around the world came together to deflect the asteroid, they caused a chunk to split off.

During the simulation, the 500- to 850-foot-wide (140- to 260-meter-wide) asteroid was on course to hit Earth near Denver when the space agencies deflected it using "kinetic impactors"— a type of fast-moving spacecraft designed specifically to knock asteroids off course.

Read more:NASA will attempt to knock an asteroid out of orbit for the first time in 2022

However, that deflection resulted in a 165- to 260-foot (50- to 80-meter) fragment breaking off the asteroid. This then ended up "on a certain collision course with Earth," and scientists were forced to watch from the ground to try and figure out where it would hit the planet.

They learned 10 days before it hit that it was headed for New York City and would come into the atmosphere at 43,000 miles per hour (19 kilometers per second).

This would produce "a large fireball or 'megabolide'" and release between 5 and 20 megatons of energy on impact. For comparison, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined created 0.04 megatons of energy.

Those involved in the simulation determined that the only way to keep people safe was to evacuate the entire city of New York, USA Today reported.

NASA says the risk of such a disaster is low, but they need to be prepared

NASA said that the simulation "is designed to help key decision makers practice for a real asteroid impact" but reassured people that: "Currently, there is no known asteroid with a significant probability of impacting Earth in the next century."

Paul Chodas, the director of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies and the author of the simulation, said: "We need to challenge ourselves and ask the tough questions."

Read more:'No image will surpass this': Hubble telescope astronomers created a stunning picture of the deep universe with 16 years' worth of photos

He said that a scenario in which an asteroid hit a major city was unlikely and that if an asteroid hit Earth, it would likely hit the ocean.

Chodas said that at NASA: "Each day we ask, what if?"

"You don't learn anything if you don't study the worst possible case each day."

FEMA also said that such simulations are important because they help the agency be prepared for major disasters.

Leviticus Lewis from FEMA's response-operations division said: "Bringing together the disaster management community and the scientific community is critical to preparing for a potential asteroid impact in the future."

NASA is taking the threat of an asteroid impact seriously. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told the conference that people need to take the idea that an asteroid could crash into Earth more seriously.

He said that people often dismiss it because of the "giggle factor," or scientific theories that seem too ridiculous to be likely.

But he said that the risk was real, even if people tend to think of Hollywood films when they consider the possibility.

Read more: NASA chief warns that people need to take the threat of a meteor crashing into Earth much more seriously

"We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood. It's not about movies. This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know right now to host life, and that is the planet Earth," he said.

NASA and other space agencies around the world scan the skies for near-Earth objects (NEOs), such as asteroids and comets.

It said that the real work preparing for an impact "goes on mostly out of the public eye."

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NOW WATCH: NASA's 5-step plan for when it discovers a giant, killer asteroid headed straight for Earth

• A NASA research center confirmed that a massive fireball landed on Tuesday in the Great Australian Bight just off the coast of South Australia. 
• People in parts of Victoria and South Australia reported seeing large flashes of bright white light at around 10:30 pm on Tuesday.
• The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies in California confirmed that the bright light was actually an impressive fireball with a calculated impact energy of 1.6 kilotons of explosive power.
• Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories.

A NASA research center confirmed that a massive fireball landed on Tuesday in the Great Australian Bight just off the coast of South Australia.

The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the California Institute of Technology analyzes the impact time, location, and amount of energy generated by meteors and asteroids that approach earth. The research facility uses high-precision orbit solutions of the space objects to predict the risk of impact and supports NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. 

US government sensors have been monitoring fireballs — or "exceptionally bright meteors,"as NASA explains— since 1988. The chart below from the research center maps the location and impact energy of the brightest fireballs reported. 

People in parts of Victoria and South Australia reported seeing large flashes of bright white light at around 10:30 pm local time on Tuesday.

Read more:SpaceX just unleashed its first 60 Starlink high-speed internet satellites and recorded a 'weird' video of the maneuver

The center confirmed that the bright light was actually an impressive fireball with a calculated impact energy of 1.6 kilotons of explosive power. It traveled at a velocity of 11.5 kilometers per second (7 miles per second) and ultimately landed in the Great Australian Bight just off South Australia's coast. 

NASA engineer Dr Steve Chesley told ABC Radio that the meteor could have been the size of a small car when it hit the atmosphere, and it was actually traveling at a slower speed than most asteroids. 

Check out video captured by the South Australia Police Department which shows the exact moment the meteor lit up the night sky: 

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NOW WATCH: Here's what can happen if you hold your pee too long

• An amateur astronomer accidentally captured video of a massive collision on Jupiter in August.
• A new analysis of that video reveals that the flash came from a 450-ton meteorthat hit the planet, triggering an explosion with as much energy as 240,000 tons of TNT.
• Seeing such flashes on Jupiter is rare, and capturing one on video is even rarer. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

On a warm night last month, amateur astronomer Ethan Chappel set up a small telescope in his backyard in Cibolo, Texas and pointed it toward Jupiter. As the behemoth planet came into focus, a burst of light erupted on its surface — the flash was as bright as Jupiter's moon Io.

A new analysis of Chappel's video suggests that he accidentally captured the moment a 450-ton meteor crashed into Jupiter. The analysis, conducted by Ramanakumar Sankar and Csaba Palotai at the Florida Institute of Technology, calculated the energy of the resulting explosion to be equivalent to 240,000 tons of TNT.

That makes this the sixth impact flash on Jupiter that's been visible from Earth since 2010, and the second-brightest of those flashes.

"Capturing videos are a normal part of my routine. I was lucky to be there at the right time," Chappel told Business Insider shortly after publishing the images on Twitter.

The flash of the meteor's explosion appears near the center-left of Jupiter's outline about 5 seconds into Chappel's video (below). It lasts about 1.5 seconds.

The video is the researchers' only data on the impact, but Palotai told Business Insider in an email that his team has "some modeling capability that can possibly shed light on some of the details ... that cannot be inferred from the video only." 

The researchers hope to submit their analysis for publication in about a month, he added.

Astronomers rushed to analyze the rare video

Marc Delcroix, a French amateur astronomer who studies these impact flashes, explained in a press release that detecting an event like this is rare.

"The impact flashes are faint, short, and can be easily missed while observing the planets for hours," he said.

Even Chappel didn't realize what he had captured until he processed the video a few hours later. That's when he called Delcroix, who then called planetary scientist Ricardo Hueso. Delcroix and Hueso are the designers of a software tool called DeTeCt that Chappel used to process the video.

"In less than two days after the impact, we had a light-curve of the impact and a first estimate of size and mass of the object," Hueso told Business Insider in an email.

Meanwhile in Florida, Sankar and Palotai saw Chappel's video "all over the news," Palotai said, and started their own preliminary analysis. The two groups soon linked up.

"It is the first time that we have had a data with a quality good enough to characterize [a meteor's] fragmentation in Jupiter's atmosphere," Hueso said. 

That fragmentation allowed Sankar and Palotai to make precise estimates of the meteor's density. They found it to be similar to a stony-iron meteor, which is made of silicate, nickel, and iron. That likely means the object was an asteroid, rather than a comet. (Asteroids are made up of rock and metals, while comets are ice, dust, and rock.)

The findings, which Delcroix and Hueso presented at a conference in Geneva this week, also suggest the meteor was about 39 to 52 feet (12 to 16 meters) in diameter. It disintegrated about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Jupiter's clouds.

The energy the collision emitted was about half of what the Chelyabinsk meteor released when it exploded in Earth's atmosphere, above the Russian city of the same name in 2013.

More impacts to observe and more people to observe them

Hueso said that before Chappel's video of the August impact, he estimated that 10 to 60 objects like this crash into Jupiter each year. But he's now revised that number to somewhere between 20 and 60 collisions.

"Because of Jupiter's large size and gravitational field, this impact rate is 10,000 times larger than the impact rate of similar objects on Earth," Hueso said in the press release.

Hueso and Delcroix run an amateur impact-flash detection project, so both hope that Chappel's video will spur more amateur astronomers to gather similar footage of impacts on Jupiter and Saturn.

"The amateur community has been galvanized by this event," Delcroix said. "The number of observers and the volume of data being processed is increasing rapidly."

SEE ALSO: Jupiter got hit by a planet with 10 times the mass of Earth billions of years ago, and its core is still reeling, a new study suggests

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NOW WATCH: The fascinating and terrible things that would happen to you if you tried to fly on Jupiter — and other planets

• A spectacular photo shows Comet Neowise hanging amid the aurora borealis, with a mysterious atmospheric phenomenon called STEVE and a meteor streaking overhead.
• Farmer Donna Lach snapped the action-packed shot on Tuesday while she was photographing the comet.
• After August, Comet Neowise won't be visible on Earth again for another 6,800 years. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Comet Neowise — a glowing ball of space ice with two colorful tails — has starred in countless photos as it streaks through the skies across the Northern Hemisphere this week. On Tuesday, three cosmic co-stars joined it, making for an astonishing spectacle.

The image above shows a split-second meteor streaking across the sky, the green and purple aurora shimmering over Comet Neowise, and purple-grey ribbons dancing in a mysterious atmospheric phenomenon called Strong Thermal Emissions Velocity Enhancement (STEVE).

The shot was one of nearly 600 that photographer and farmer Donna Lach snapped on Tuesday night near her farm in Manitoba, Canada. Lach volunteers for a citizen science project called Aurorasaurus, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, which first discovered STEVE in 2016.

The aurora appears when charged particles from the sun interact with oxygen and nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere, but STEVE's origins are still a mystery.

From Lach's vantage point, both sets of colorful lights lined up perfectly with the fleeting appearance of a meteor — a space rock vaporizing in Earth's atmosphere — all while Comet Neowise hung bright near the horizon.

The comet is expected to get closest to our planet on July 23, approaching within about 64 million miles. But the next few nights — through Sunday — may provide the best opportunity to spot it in the sky. After it rockets away again, Neowise won't return to the inner solar system for 6,768 years.

Lach said she initially set out to capture the comet against the aurora borealis.

"The reports had been forecasting aurora for a couple of days so I was going to be ready to catch both," she told Business Insider. She wasn't expecting STEVE or the meteor.

She applied "a good layer of DEET," she said,  and then "stood there swatting mosquitoes forever until it finally got dark."

By 11:30 p.m., the comet was high above the horizon and the aurora was glittering across half the sky. An hour and a half later, the vertical stripes of STEVE appeared — far from the comet, but not too far for her camera's wide-angle lens. 

"I was thrilled to see I could catch the span from STEVE to Neowise," Lach said. "I couldn't believe it when I caught the long meteor in one frame. I just stood smiling and saying 'wow' to myself and the critters in the ditch."

Lach added that the glittering display gave her "an epic night that I will never forget."

An earlier version of this story contained a photo identifying part of the aurora as STEVE. The photo has been updated to correct the error.

SEE ALSO: The biggest comet in 25 years is dazzling stargazers all over the world. Here are the best photos and videos they've taken so far.

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NOW WATCH: Watch the unbelievable death spiral this spacecraft flew around a comet for 2.5 years

The first meteor shower of spring is peaking Thursday morning.

The Lyrid meteor shower, which happens in late April each year, occurs when the Earth passes through the tail of a comet. As debris from that comet enters our planet's atmosphere, it burns up, leaving streaks in the sky that are visible to the naked eye for several seconds. 

When the Lyrids peak, people can expect to see between 10 and 20 meteors every hour. These meteors often leave "glowing dust trains" in their wake as they disintegrate, according to NASA.

The moon is more than half full this week, which will make it trickier to spot the shooting stars. Here are some tips for catching the Lyrids in action.

Head out early Thursday morning, before the sun rises

The best time to glimpse the Lyrids is in the wee morning hours on Thursday, April 22, before the sun rises. 

Waiting until the waxing moon sets — about 4 a.m. on the US East Coast — will make it easier to spot the meteors and their dust trains. Otherwise, the bright glow from the almost-full moon (it'll be 68% full on Thursday) may obscure the meteor streaks.

Head to an area well away from a city or street lights, and bring a sleeping bag or blanket. No need to pack a telescope or binoculars, since meteor showers are best seen with the naked eye.

"Lie flat on your back with your feet facing east and look up, taking in as much of the sky as possible," NASA's website said. "After about 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adapt and you will begin to see meteors."

The shooting stars can appear anywhere in the sky, but if you need a reference point, look to the harp-like constellation Lyra, from which the Lyrids often seem to emerge. (That's how they get their name.)

If you miss out on the show Thursday morning, there will still be meteors to see Friday. In fact, the Lyrid meteor shower this year will continue through April 30. Usually, it ends by April 25.

One of the oldest-known meteor showers

Humanity has known about the Lyrid meteor shower for almost three millennia: The first sighting dates back to 687 BC in China, according to NASA. 

The meteors hail from a comet called Thatcher, named after the astronomer who first identified the space rock in 1861.

It takes Thatcher 415 years to orbit the sun (we won't see it again until the year 2276). As it circles the solar system, Thatcher's tail leaves behind a trail of debris and leftover comet particles.

Every April, Earth passes through Thatcher's debris and gets bombarded with comet litter for two weeks — which makes for a dazzling meteor shower. 

After the Lyrids pass, there are still 11 meteor showers to look out for this year. One of the most popular, the Perseids, will peak on the night of August 11. 

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NOW WATCH: Here's what you're actually seeing when you spot a meteor shower