This was an interesting event. A few minutes before impact it would have been visible at around 11th magnitude moving rapidly across the sky as seen from the UK.
I like examples of NTUs (non-technical units) when describing the characteristics of astronomical objects. Bill Barton alerted me to this classic example in the Mail Online.
That lead to a fascinating, but rather bizarre, exchange on Twitter. It was noted that “giraffe” could be a unit of mass or of length. I proposed that the “slug” be used as that is a standard of unit of mass. Things got rather silly after that.
I’m not surprised it got silly. The slug was an odd one though. It was the unit of gravitational mass in the FPS system but I don’t think it got used much.
This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Nick James.