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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"To me it made no sense to pull one of even a few objects out of the swarm and call them something other than part of the swarm." -Mike Brown, A.K.A. PlutoKiller
In our Solar System, the four rocky planets dominate the inner portion, while the four gas giants dominate the outer Solar System. But…
Everyone knows the Solar System, right? Sun at the center, followed by the four, rocky inner planets, the asteroid belt, the four outer gas giants with their moons, and then the Kuiper belt.
Sometimes Jupiter sends an asteroid headed our way, and sometimes Neptune sends a Kuiper belt object…
Final day of the Exoplanet Rising workshop.
Start off with migration theory, then scattering and collisions.
Finish with tidal destruction and future observational prospects.
Lubow and Malhotra.
Then Thommes and Armitage.
Followed by Ogilvie and Traub.
Then we are done.
This is a public service…
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles.
--Children everywhere, up until very recently
Taking a look at the new ring discovered around Saturn made me realize something. Most of us don't realize how full of crap our Solar System is.
I don't mean planets, or moons, or comets or asteroids…
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