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Category: astro
Posted on: August 27, 2010 3:36 PM, by Steinn Sigurðsson
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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Comments
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?
Posted by: Greg Laden | August 27, 2010 4:11 PM
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.
Posted by: Steinn Sigurdsson | August 27, 2010 4:16 PM
Go to the video on Youtube to read more comments about the coloring and why see the flashes of discovery.
Posted by: NoAstronomer | August 27, 2010 4:31 PM
Very interesting. And not a little scary - all those NEO's dancing around us!
Posted by: Gray Gaffer | August 27, 2010 5:11 PM
@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?
Posted by: Lurker #753 | August 27, 2010 5:49 PM
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.
Posted by: andy | August 27, 2010 6:09 PM
VERY nice! Thank you!
Posted by: Rosie Redfield | August 28, 2010 7:26 PM
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?
Posted by: Russell | August 28, 2010 8:47 PM
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | August 28, 2010 10:16 PM
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.
Posted by: Nathan | August 29, 2010 4:29 AM
Is it possible for the asteroids to someday come to form another planet in the future?
Posted by: Kris | September 1, 2010 3:40 PM
@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
Posted by: Steinn Sigurdsson | September 1, 2010 4:15 PM