Fire in the Sky
Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
This “accessible and always entertaining” (Booklist) combination of history, pop science, and in-depth reporting offers a fascinating account of the asteroids that hit Earth long ago and those streaming toward us now, as well as how prepared we are against asteroid-caused catastrophe.
One of these days, warns Gordon Dillow, the Earth will be hit by a comet or asteroid of potentially catastrophic size. The only question is when. In the meantime, we need to get much better at finding objects hurtling our way, and if they’re large enough to penetrate the atmosphere without burning up, figure out what to do about them.
We owe many of science’s most important discoveries to the famed Meteor Crater, a mile-wide dimple on the Colorado Plateau created by an asteroid hit 50,000 years ago. In his masterfully researched Fire in the Sky, Dillow unpacks what the Crater has to tell us. Prior to the early 1900s, the world believed that all craters—on the Earth and Moon—were formed by volcanic activity. Not so. The revelation that Meteor Crater and others like it were formed by impacts with space objects has led to a now accepted theory about what killed off the dinosaurs, and it has opened up a new field of asteroid observation that is brimming with urgency. Dillow looks at great asteroid hits of the past and modern-day asteroid hunters and defense planning experts, including America’s first Planetary Defense Officer.
Satellite sensors confirm that a Hiroshima-scale blast occurs in the atmosphere every year, and a smaller, one-kiloton blast every month. While Dillow makes clear that the objects above can be deadly, he consistently inspires awe with his descriptions of their size, makeup, and origins. Both a riveting work of popular science and a warning to not take for granted the space objects hurtling overhead, Fire in the Sky is, ultimately, a testament to our universe’s celestial wonders.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Dillow (Where the Money Is) packs quite a punch with this volume about humanity's expanding understanding of the threat posed by objects from space. He reveals Gene Shoemaker, who became an asteroid hunter in the 1950s when he noticed the resemblance between Arizona's mile-long Meteor Crater and nuclear bomb test craters, as a key figure in shaping this understanding. Two others are father-son team Luis and Walter Alvarez, for their 1980 theory that a meteorite was largely responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. Dillow identifies an additional touchstone for asteroid hunting in 1993, when Shoemaker's wife Carolyn and assistant David Levy discovered the Shoemaker-Levy Comet 9 that, by spectacularly colliding with Jupiter the following year, impelled the U.S. government to greatly increase funding for projects searching for dangerous Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). Dillow also touches on recent instances of asteroids intersecting with Earth, including one that burned up in the atmosphere above his Arizona home in 2016, and proposes "kinetic impactors," rather than nuclear weapons, for defense against Earth-bound asteroids. Revealing the estimated chances of a disastrous strike over the next century to be low but not zero, this enjoyable survey should have appeal beyond pop science fans to the researchers and officials concerned with preparing for such a potentially calamitous event.
