A football field sized asteroid may hit the city of New York while it obliterates the city in a matter of seconds and all that moves within it. Scientists state that the tidal waves of energy unleashed by the collision would be equivalent to several Hydrogen bombs going off at once, a scary scenario indeed.

The chances of an asteroid hitting the Earth one day are very real and blowing up an asteroid in real life, will be more complicated than in the movies according to sources at the Tel Aviv University (TAU). While Astrophysicists agree that the best method for avoiding a catastrophic collision would be to change the path of the asteroid heading toward our planet.

Polishook and Brosch are among the few scientists in the world researching the structure and composition of asteroids; a critical first step in learning how to destroy them before they reach the Earth’s atmosphere. Their research could prevent catastrophe as blowing up an asteroid may create many equally dangerous smaller asteroids of about 100 metres each in diameter, twice the size of the asteroid that created the famous Arizona crater. The procedure to handle this asteroid is currently being discussed at the 2008 meeting of Asteroids, Comets and Meteors, sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore.

The heavens literally smiled down on Earth Monday in a rare celestial trifecta of Venus, Jupiter, and the moon. The planets aligned; an event known as a conjunction on last Sunday night. They were joined by a thin sliver of moon on Monday.

The rare planetary meeting was visible from all parts of the world, even from light-polluted cities such as Hong Kong and New York. People in Asia witnessed a smiley face, while skywatchers in the United States saw a frown. The three brightest objects in the sky were so tightly gathered that one could eclipse them with a thumb, according to sources. The next possible visible Venus-Jupiter conjunction will be on the evening of March 14, 2012, but the two planets will appear farther apart in the sky.