The massive 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile may have changed the entire Earth’s rotation and shortened the length of days on our planet, a NASA scientist said Monday. ~news.yahoo.com

Sounds biblical…

The quake, the seventh strongest earthquake in recorded history, hit Chile Saturday and should have shortened the length of an Earth day by 1.26 milliseconds, according to research scientist Richard Gross at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis,” NASA officials said in a Monday update.

Hubble takes pictures of all sorts of weird things, but seldom does NASA refer to them in a press release as “mysterious.” The second sign of worry: The object is larger than the parameters of its own dust trail – like, you know, a spaceship. Lastly, it appears to be shaped like an “X.” Or, more ominously, like a Klingon bird of prey. Why is that?

“I wish I knew,” David Jewitt, NASA’s chief detective on the case, said Wednesday from UCLA, where he is an astronomer.

Gulp.

Before you begin your orderly descent into the bomb shelter, Jewitt does have a non-alien-invasion-related guess: He believes the object may be a comet created by the collision of two asteroids. ~thestar.com