[pharmablogger]

Still all plasma

There's nothing "special" about it being plasma though, so why the wink?

It would be one hell of a sight to see an asteroid attempt to "hit" the sun, given it would probably vaporize before it actually touches the surface. If one was large enough, and traveled fast enough at it, and if the sun was not spouting prominences and flares in its direction, it should look like a big splash. It wouldn't be a "splash" at all - the density of the photosphere is less than 1% of the Earth's ground atmospheric pressure. Look at the link I gave in an earlier post; the impact of two comets just causes a burst in particles.

But then again, the Sun is roughly 1 million times larger in volume than the earth. And an asteroid that we are talking about is....how much smaller? 1 million times smaller than that? So an asteroid that would even show a "splash" has to be a trillion times larger than a regular dinosaur-eliminating asteroid. Again, looking at that previous video, the asteroid only needs to be in the order of a typical comet nucleus - just a few km in size.

In the end it would probably look like a sparkler firecracker when it gets about halfway past the orbit of Mercury (between Sun & Mercury). Not really. Although the corona has an incredibly high temperature (over 1 million Kelvin), it's density is so low that particle interactions are quite rare. The reason why we haven't sent any spacecraft really close to the Sun is the effects of the high energy particles, which would just fry an circuitry in an instant, rather than the effects of temperature.

As for where to hit on the earth....Antarctica. Preferably as perpendicular to the ground as possible (to melt in the atmosphere more), and aiming at England. This way the majority of the shock waves won't hit any land until it reaches Greenland. Also, if it was during our winter season that would be better, since it would be the summer season in the south pole and thus a hotter atmosphere to begin with. Unlikely to hit there anyway, as virtually no large asteroids orbit the Sun at such an angle to the ecliptic. Of course, the large mass of meteorite samples in Antarctica shows that some do get through, albeit rather small samples. The most destructive of seismic waves travel through the crust (L-waves, in particular) so any strike in that area will mean utter devastation for South America, South Africa and Australia in a matter of moments. Basically, there's nowhere safe on Earth against a large asteroid or comet impact.

And as for protection, that is what a Hydrogen bomb is for. It can do more damage in the vacuum of space than an atom bomb can do (I believe it's because the H-bomb is a neutron bomb / fusion bomb). Who am I kidding? We will just use about 6. Hell, even detonate it after it enters about 1 mile in or something. "Deflection" works if it is far enough away, but after it passes the Earth, it NEEDS to be destroyed since the new orbit it would have plotted may dump it back onto us again someday. Hydrogen bombs are fission/fusion bombs - a fissile weapon provides the necessary heat to drive the fusion reaction. The weapons need to detonate on impact, not just in space, because there is no atmosphere to carry the explosion forces. Your estimate for the number of current nuclear weapons sufficient to destroy an asteroid enough to remove all trace of potential threat is far too short.