{"id":20171,"date":"2015-12-22T13:13:59","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T21:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/giant-comets-may-threaten-earth-astronomers"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:17:19","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:17:19","slug":"giant-comets-may-threaten-earth-astronomers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/giant-comets-may-threaten-earth-astronomers","title":{"rendered":"Giant comets may threaten Earth: astronomers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/giant-comets-may-threaten-earth-astronomers.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Can there be any doubt any more that colonizing, at minimum, the rest of the solar system is an existential species imperative!?<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Most studies of potential Earth-smashers focus on objects in the asteroid belt roughly between Mars, Earth\u2019s outside neighbour, and Jupiter on its other flank, said the researchers.<\/p>\n<p>But they noted that the discovery in the last two decades of hundreds of giant comets dubbed centaurs, albeit with much larger orbits, requires expanding the list of potential hazards.<\/p>\n<p>These balls of ice and dust, typically 50\u2013100 kilometres (31\u221262 miles) wide, have unstable, elliptical orbits that start way beyond Neptune, the most distant planet from the Sun.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/giant-comets-may-threaten-earth-astronomers-145625835.html\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Can there be any doubt any more that colonizing, at minimum, the rest of the solar system is an existential species imperative!? Most studies of potential Earth-smashers focus on objects in the asteroid belt roughly between Mars, Earth\u2019s outside neighbour, and Jupiter on its other flank, said the researchers. But they noted that the discovery [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":362,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asteroid-comet-impacts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/362"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20171"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68974,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20171\/revisions\/68974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}