You’ll need a big bomb to keep us apart (Image: Adastra/Taxi/Getty)
THE regenerating liquid-metal robots in the Terminator movies have a cosmic relation: incoming asteroids that quickly reassemble if blasted by a nuclear bomb.
If a sizeable asteroid is found heading towards Earth with little warning, the only way to prevent an impact may be to blast it to bits with a nuke.
But too small a bomb would cause the fragments to fly apart only slowly, allowing them to clump together under their mutual gravity. Simulations now show this can happen in an alarmingly short time.
Don Korycansky of…
