Astral Bodies

Astral Bodies

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by scientists. The C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) nucleus is about 80 miles in diameter, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island, NASA says.
—NPR, "The Hubble telescope confirms the largest comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers," by Deepa Shivaram, April 13, 2022.

Photo comparing Rhode Island to the Ptolemaeus Crater on the moon, 2020.
—Museum of Natural History and Planetarium (Providence, RI), Facebook, August 6, 2020.

An asteroid the size of Rhode Island will briefly blot out one of the brightest stars in the sky overnight tonight (March 19-20), and you can watch the rare celestial event live online, weather permitting.
—FoxNews.com, "Watch a 45-mile-wide asteroid blot out a star tonight," by Mike Wall, March 19, 2014.

...what are the chances that the Enterprise crew drops Kirk just a CGI filled foot race away from the cave that Spock's in? Hell, even if the entire planet is the size of Rhode Island, the chances against that happening are vanishingly small.
—"Five Gaping Plot Holes Hollywood Knows You Won't Notice," by Mark Hill, December 21, 2009. Submitted by vi.

Now the asteroid [NT7] is only 1.5 miles wide, not even big enough for some kind of Rhode Island size comparison, so just how bad could the damage really be [if it struck Earth]?
—John Stewart on The Daily Show with John Stewart, July 29, 2002.

Space-derived materials that survive entry into the Earth's atmosphere are called bolides. The largest known bolide impact occurred 32.5 million years ago at the present-day Chesapeake Bay. It made a crater twice the size of Rhode Island and deep as the Grand Canyon.
—Virginia Museum of Natural History, "Virginia trivia: Have any large comets ever hit Virginia?," May 18, 2000.

The first few million years of the Moon's existence were so violent that few traces of this period remain. As a molten outer layer gradually cooled and solidified into different kinds of rock, the Moon was bombarded by huge asteroids and smaller objects. Some of the asteroids were as large as Rhode Island or Delaware, and their collisions with the Moon created basins hundreds of kilometers across.
—NASA, "Facts about the moon," 1989.

Last Edited
2022-04-13