The Earth colliding with another planet it is not one of those scenarios in which we can talk about survivors. The end of our species would be immediate, irrevocable and probably very unpleasant, but calculating the effects for our planet allows us to study very interesting things.
A team of researchers from the uuniverses from Durham and Glasgow was interested in studying what happens to the atmosphere of a planet like ours if you are unlucky enough to crash into a smaller planet at the highest speeds at which we travel through space. To simulate that improbable collision have resorted to a supercomputer called COSMA (Cosmology Machine) capable of simulating the effects at the level of both the planet’s atmosphere and the different layers that compose it. The results are fascinating. You can see them in this video.
Thanks to these simulations we know, for example, that the shock would rip out part of the planet’s atmosphere, but it all depends on the angle of impact. An indirect impact would not destroy the entire atmosphere of a planet, although it would probably destroy almost all life on its surface. That seems to be the case for what happened 4.5 billion years ago, when an object we called Tea hit the Earth. The fragments of that clash amalgamated to form the Moon. According to this simulation, the shock was indirect and eliminated between 10 and 50 percent of the original atmosphere.of the planet.
