Could This Comet Hit Earth in the Next Millennium?

This comet is one of the few that really spawned some controversy regarding the possibility of a collision with Earth and was even classified as having "a non-zero possibility of impact." This means it could hit our planet or the Moon, sometime around 3044, or at least that is what astronomers thought about four decades ago.

There are some problems with this comet, starting from the fact that its trajectory has been found to be more than a little off compared to what astronomers had calculated, which made astronomer Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggest that it will hit Earth in the next millennium.

He eventually retracted his warning, but the fact still remains that the comet returned to the area near the Sun in 1992, 15 days earlier than expected. This initially made the researcher think that it could be off again on August 14, 2126, which could eventually lead to a collision sometime in the next millennium.

After new observations of the comet's motion, he concluded that Comet Swift-Tuttle will pass a comfortable 15 million miles from Earth on its next trip to the inner solar system, in 2126 and that in 3044, it may pass within a million miles of our planet, in what astronomers call a "near-miss" in cosmic terms.

So, it seems that we are safe for now, since new calculations show the comet has been constantly appearing in the solar system, producing a beautiful meteor shower. All is fine, everyone go back to your business, you wouldn't be around to see it anyway, in over a thousand years.

But is anything 100% sure in astronomy? I'm not trying to claim this is sensational news, but I would still like to point out that no astronomer can safely predict what will happen one thousand years for now, or that nothing will happen.

After all, the Universe is not quite the stable place we like to think of it, since planets are known to smash into stars, galaxies engulf each other and supermassive black holes could roam the vast expanse of space after being displaced from the center of their galaxies.

So, next time an astronomer is telling you he can accurately predict this and that, ask him how come the solar storm cycle appears one year later than they so "accurately" predicted?