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Radiation should be able to deflect asteroids as large as 4 km across
Researchers blast silica with an intense X-ray burst, watch it evaporate.
Some scientists at Sandia National Lab have decided to tackle a very cool question with one of the cooler bits of hardware on Earth: , which can create a pulse of X-rays bright enough to vaporize rock. While gravity would have its way, the events triggered by the radiation evaporating away a bunch of the rock would be over before the sample experienced any significant downward acceleration. Its movement during this time, and thus the force imparted to it by the evaporation of its surface, was tracked by a laser interferometer placed on the far side of the disk from the X-ray source.
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