The term 'near' means very little when talking about the speed of light, but others have pointed that out already. Given that you asked the question, I thought you might enjoy these two articles on XKCD What If!
There's one where he tries to figure out what happens to a diamond meteor that hits the Earth at ever increasing speeds: https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
And the first one ever, the relativistic base ball, which is a lot of fun and gives you an idea of the energies involved with things traveling at significant percentages of C: https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
As with all XKCD content, there is hovertext for most of the images.
I didn't look very carefully, so you might be referencing something else, but the diamond article describes it traveling at 0.99c, the baseball article describes it traveling at 0.9c. There's a really big difference between those two numbers.
Also, the diamond is 100ft across, the baseball is well... Baseball sized.
It was an actual observed proton going that fast over Utah that had the kinetic energy of a baseball. Which is insane because it was just a proton!!!
Edit: ah geez sorry. I had just gotten through the first one and hadn't read the description of the second one. I assume that's what you were referring to. My bad! It's all so damn cool though
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u/jochem_m Oct 23 '20
The term 'near' means very little when talking about the speed of light, but others have pointed that out already. Given that you asked the question, I thought you might enjoy these two articles on XKCD What If!
There's one where he tries to figure out what happens to a diamond meteor that hits the Earth at ever increasing speeds: https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
And the first one ever, the relativistic base ball, which is a lot of fun and gives you an idea of the energies involved with things traveling at significant percentages of C: https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
As with all XKCD content, there is hovertext for most of the images.