Asteroid Barbecue

For the last two posts I've brought you pictures of the terrible earthquake that leveled the city of Eridu. Here's a whole planet breaking up! Well, at least it's not a life-bearing planet with an atmosphere and living things to perish by the billions. This is the kind of stuff that happened for millions of years during the early times of our solar system (and countless others). Roundish planetoids would form from dust and accreted rocky matter. They would get larger by collecting more stuff by gravity. Then some other rocky lump would smack into them and bust them back into loose gravel again. All of this happened in a hot, harsh environment with lots of spilling magma. After a while, the planetoids got big enough to absorb the debris in their areas and clear out a space for themselves. All those craters on the planet and moon pictures you see come from a time like this, when planets were bombarded by rocks and barbecued by heat and radiation. It must have been fun to watch.

"Asteroid Barbecue" is acrylic on illustration board, 10" x 7", October 1990.