Cool planetary collision video

[Johnny Rico]

NASA has a story on its website about a celestial body about the size of our moon smashing into another celestial body about the size of Mercury.

The have a 39 second artists rendering video of this collision that's pretty cool to watch as the 2 bodies essentially become one.

It's a 25 MB .mov QT clip, and can be directly downloade from this link:
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/377528main_V-Animation_Sorenson3.mov

A still pic can be found here:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/377523main_a-planetImpact-full.jpg

The full story can be found here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/spitzer-20090810.html

 

[M'Sharak]

NASA has a story on its website about a celestial body about the size of our moon smashing into another celestial body about the size of Mercury.

The have a 39 second artists rendering video of this collision that's pretty cool to watch as the 2 bodies essentially become one.

It's a 25 MB .mov QT clip, and can be directly downloade from this link:
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/377528main_V-Animation_Sorenson3.mov

Or you can watch it on YouTube at the Bad Astronomy blog, where Phil Plait had this comment about the animation:

P.S. The animation above is cool, but not a perfect representation of what happened. For example, the shock wave ring travels around the planet as shown, but when the ring converges on the point opposite the collision point, there would be a huge explosion and a vast plume of material launched into space. No one ever puts that in their animations, and I think it would be very cool! I need to get people who create physics-based simulations to make one that’s accurate, so it can be used in situations like this.

It's still pretty cool, though.

 

[Zachary Smith]

Would not the smaller body be ripped apart as it approached the larger one rather than just hitting it full on as the animation shows?

 

[SilentP]

I think the smaller body has enough gravitation pull at the centre of it's own mass to keep it somewhat intact as it impacts the larger body, though I could imagine at least some kind of warping on both bodies as they approach each other. Thing is that gravity is (comparitively) a weak physical force, so the warping probably would happen way after it becomes academic...

 

[M'Sharak]

Would not the smaller body be ripped apart as it approached the larger one rather than just hitting it full on as the animation shows?

I think the larger body would need to have far greater mass than a Mercury-sized planet for that to happen. There'd almost certainly be some deformation of both bodies prior to impact, but I'm not sure you could expect the smaller to be ripped apart.