Covid minor event in solar system

‘The world continues to turn’ is an old phrase meaning that no matter what happens, things continue to continue. The Covid-19 pandemic has many of us thinking that this global epidemic is the end of things. In reality it is just a very minor event in the scale of our planet earth and the solar system.
This is the learned opinion of John Dunlevey, a retired professor of the University of Limpopo and an avid student of the solar system.
According to Dunlevey, the first extra-solar asteroid (chunk of rock from outside our solar system) called Oumuamua was detected in August 2017. This tumbling, spindle-shaped asteroid somewhat less than 1 000 m long and 300 m wide never got closer than 24 000 000 km from earth, so studying it was rather like looking at a grain of sand in Cape Town while standing in Polokwane. Also, as Oumuamua was only detected after it had passed Earth, and was on the ‘way out’ travelling at around 80 km per second, it is remarkable how much information the scientists were able to gather.
“Then, last year in August another interstellar visitor, 2I/Borisov was seen. However, this one was very different, being more like a comet – a frozen mass of gas (mostly carbon monoxide and water). 2l/Borisov was much larger than Oumuamua, with a core just under 16 km in diameter and a gas and particle cloud bigger than Earth, but it never got closer than 300 000 000 km. Furthermore, due to gravitation stress and the effects of the solar wind, 2I/Borisov progressively broke up during March and April 2020 (after it rounded the sun) and some of the gas and dust that it lost will remain in our solar system after the large fragments pass out into deep space,” Dunlevey explains.
The two extra-solar visitors were very different; Oumuamua was a rocky object believed to have a composition similar to a meteorite, that was very little affected by the fly by, while 2I/Borisov was a mass of frozen gas that broke up by the experience. So the question arises – how regularly do these objects visit our solar system, and are they dangerous?”
“Answers are not simple; it seems extra-solar visitors are much more common than was previously thought; there could even be several a year allowing for the fact that we do not detect the small ones. However, they pose very, very little threat, passing millions of kilometres from Earth as a once-off event, unlike comets that return regularly. Yes, there is strong evidence that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a massive meteorite about 66 million years ago; but that seems to have been a once-in-a-billion years event, and there are no sizeable impacts recorded in human history,” he explains.

Story: Barry Viljoen