If meteor-themed disaster movies (or video games for that matter) have taught us anything, it's that heavenly bodies that are out to get us can always be deflected with a good slam of a nuclear warhead.

Of course, there's always the problem of the meteor splitting in two (a la Deep Impact and Final Fantasy VII), and then you have two killer meteors out to get you. Then you're in trouble.

Then again, the universe doesn't need any help from any nukes to pitch us a double whammy. Aside from your run of the mill asteroid, once in a while you also get a binary system, which is two asteroids orbiting each other as they travel through space.

One such binary system passed by us recently. Just yesterday in fact. Called the 2008 BT18 system, these two asteroids with intertwined gravity passed by about 1.4 million miles away. The larger one is 1,970 feet in diameter, while the smaller one is 650 feet.

That's a picture of the system above. If you're wondering why it's fuzzy, it's because it was only taken by a radar.

It won't strike the planet, but it gave scientists a good chance to study how a binary system works, to figure out how to deflect it. Better safe than sorry. They are marked as "potentially hazardous" by NASA because their future orbits have not been determined.

Even rarer than a binary system is a triple-asteroid system. One was actually found near us just a few months ago. Still, all it takes is just one. If you recall, the Apophis asteroid is still scheduled to fly past us soon, and some believe it may actually be the world-ender.

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More Earth-shattering stories:

• Too close for comfort: Apophis asteroid to be studied
• Astronomers find triple-asteroid system near Earth
• A 30-megaton blast from the past: the Tunguska Event
• Baptistina: the asteroid family that wiped out the dinosaurs