It’s a classic Hollywood action movie scenario: a gigantic asteroid is hurtling toward Earth at breakneck speed, threatening to unleash an unholy catastrophe on our blue home planet.

While the protagonists in the corresponding movies always manage to deflect the galactic projectile at the last second, today we would like to deal with the question of what would really happen if the Earth were to be threatened by a cosmic boulder.

Could the planet survive such a collision? What would be the consequences of such an event? And how would things look if the space body hit our planet at the speed of light?