Extraordinarily good video visualizing the last three decades of asteroid discovery
It is a bit slow to start with, but really picks up in the last minute.
Worth the wait.
Nice one.
And not done yet.
About time to do a similar visualization of the Kuiper belt objects and outer asteroids.
h/t Bulent via fb
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"Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise." -Ayn Rand
I recently got this comment of incredulity on my article about what wiped out the dinosaurs?
Remember that asteroid that was supposed to pass harmlessly by the Earth on Sunday? Well, things didn't go exactly as planned...
The Drake Equation is that famous equation where you count how many stars there are, figure out the chance of a star having planets, of planets having water, etc. etc. until finally you get some rough estimate of the chance of live evolving elsewhere in the universe.
Wow. I love the way the discoveries appear as flashlight beams coming out from Earth, like the drunk under the lightpost.
It also looks like the asteroids are distributed less as a function of some asteroid creating event as we learned in school and more as a function of where they have not been cleared by the energetic activity of the inner planets. Am I just making that up?
The orbital elements of the surviving asteroids are mostly set by Jupiter - resonances with Jupiter's orbit clear out zones, the so-called "Kirkwood gaps".
Known asteroids are selection biased - our ability to discover them is not uniform in orbital space, yet.
Go to the video on Youtube to read more comments about the coloring and why see the flashes of discovery.
Very interesting. And not a little scary - all those NEO's dancing around us!
@Greg #1: The existence of solid nickel-iron asteroids implies they were once molten and then gravitationally sorted - i.e. they must have been part of the interior of much larger objects that were then shattered. A certain unreliable online encyclopaedia claims (but not does not give a reference) that chemical analysis of nickel-iron meteorites indicates 50+ distinct parent bodies. As to whether this is compatible with what you were taught in school.... what were you taught in school?
It's pretty neat to see the Trojan asteroids lighting up in Jupiter's orbit. Also there seems to be a conspicuous absence of objects within the orbit of Mercury, I guess it's not a good idea to point sensitive cameras in that direction.
VERY nice! Thank you!
What technology change happens about 2009, that adds two cones of discovery, no longer just the one outbound from earth, but also tangential to our orbit?
-- Fredric Brown, âStar Mouseâ
The WISE satellite came online. Asteroids are much brighter in the IR, WISE will find all of the large NEOs.
See this discussion of the WISE asteroid survey.
Is it possible for the asteroids to someday come to form another planet in the future?
@Kris - no, the total mass in the asteroids is far too small to make a planet, and they are too widely dispersed to have any chance of agglomerating