Could a “no-search” scenario happen in real life? An astronomer explains it

Posted:

2 ene 2022 12:42 GMT

Amy Mainzer, whose team discovered Comet Neowise in 2020, has worked as a science consultant on the Netflix sitcom.

Astronomer Amy Mainzer, who worked as a science consultant for the sci-fi comedy on Netflix “No miren arriba” (“Don’t look, in Spain), spoke about whether the movie’s location, for an Earth-shattering comet, could happen in real life.

In his words, that would be “highly unlikely”. “The good news is that a really important event like the one shown in the movie, we know, can’t happen very regularly…because we’re here”, announce Humanity would not exist if such phenomena occurred “regularly in our time period,” the scientist told Yahoo Canada.

He summed up: “The last significant event was the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That’s why we know it’s a very rare event.” In this context, he explained that “smaller” events can happen frequently, which is why we “look for things [espaciales] We are trying to find out where they are.”

The team of astronomers that discovered Comet Neuwes in 2020, from which Mainzer took some of the elements to form the comet in the film, was the team. “[Neowise] It had a nice set of orbital characteristics for what we were looking for in the movie. […] In fact, I think I took some pictures of the discovery of a nuclear comet.”

For the specialist, the Netflix movie is an “invitation to make decisions based on the tools of science.” He concluded, “Science-based decision-making is indeed central to this film and the future. The way we as human beings live on this planet is largely up to us.”