The effects of such a collision could be very nasty indeed . Asteroids and their cousins, comets and meteors , have played a spectacular leading role in what the boffins insist on calling collisional evolution . Sorry, just kidding. Seriously, the arrival at enormous speed of a socking great lump of rock or iron could be terminal for us all. The only problem is that the risk is awfully difficult to calculate, and estimates of it keep varying.
Asteroids are the loose cannon of the cosmos.
And there are an awful lot of them, notably between Jupiter and Mars . Space gazers are now able to study the impact of asteroids elsewhere in the Solar System . The recent impact of the entertainingly named Shoemaker-Levy 9 asteroid on Jupiter resulted in some spectacular images . Most sensible folk find asteroids scary. Others insist they are sexy .