No one has witnessed a huge asteroid hitting the Earth, but through artists’ creative vision we can experience what it might be like or have been like – huge asteroid impacts are credited with creating the Moon and may have contributed to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs.

This illustration shows an asteroid over 500 kilometers across catastrophically colliding with the Earth. An asteroid of this size would wipe out all life on Earth. It’s possible such an asteroid collided with the Earth in the past when it was young, but there are none of this size in the Earth’s vicinity today.

This artist's representation is another view of the asteroid that crashed into the Earth and may have led to the fourth mass extinction in Earth’s history.

(Image: Don Davis/NASA)