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Comment by whileonebegin | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it quite a coincidence that the largest meteor impact since 1908 occurs just hours before the closest fly-by of a large asteroid in 100 years? Yet, NASA claims these two are unrelated.

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I'm very intrigued by this too. The consensus though seems to be that they came from completely different directions... here's a diagram that's making the rounds in Reddit[1]. It looks like this meteor landed in Russia hours before 2012DA14 even came close to being inside the moon's orbit, which makes it hard to imagine how one could have affected the other.

[1] http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/html/Years/2013/February/i...

Simple really. The rock that landed in Russia was the one our alien protectors used to deflect DA14 from hitting the earth.

They are going in nearly opposite directions and are roughly a million miles apart from each other. Once you get a real idea of how empty space is (all of the not-to-scale diagrams you get in high school are no help here) it's harder to see how they could be related than not related.

True random distributions just work that way. If something that's supposed to happen once in a hundred years is spaced out at roughly 100-year intervals, that's not random.

Yea I find this curious as well, what are the odds of that happening? How many other chunks of rock could be heading our way right now that are too small to be spotted?

> Yea I find this curious as well, what are the odds of that happening?

About '1' apparently.

Looks like we need something better to detect such kinds of occurances

Word is they were going in different directions.

I don't know but I do really hope that the one that hit Russia wasn't part of a smaller but faster one that did actually hit 2014-DA and change its course.

Otherwise the northern emisphere is in trouble.

I find that coincidence very, very weird too.

And you gotta love all the people saying: "Nothing to see here, move along", as if they had themselves ran all the computation and knew for sure there was no relation between the two events.

Relax, it's unrelated.

http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/html/Years/2013/February/i...

Coincidences do happen once in a while.

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