4 ms·
This Asteroid Shouldn’t Be Where Astronomers Found It
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- douglaswlance 8y agoNaughty asteroid!
- ghgr 8y agoInteresting how the New York Times is following the Taboola-like structure of clickbaity headlines. Maybe it's where the money is after all.
- isostatic 8y agoI'd love to read this page, but my subconscious won't allow me to follow a link with that title.
- symmitchry 8y agoLike all articles about space, the headlines was 1000 x more exciting than the contents.
- howard941 8y agoIt was worth the click to get to the article's embedded link to this article about the "Grand Tack" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jupiter-destroyer-of-worlds-may-have-paved-the-way-for-earth/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jupiter-destroyer...
- osrec 8y agoWasn't this on HN a few days ago?
- ggm 8y ago"The model astronomers had about where things should be had to be updated"
- ukulele 8y agoI've often wondered: is it possible for a grouping of asteroids to have a highly elliptical orbit and pass Earth's distance to the sun very infrequently, say every X million years? Is it possible that there is some very regular chance that the Earth would get pummelled, but only on extremely long time spans? How would we know or not know?
- askvictor 8y agoIsn't that pretty much the orbit of a comet?
- cbanek 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long-period_comets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long-period_comets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_near-parabolic_comets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_near-parabolic_comets The grouping is hard to figure out, as gravity would likely pull them together. But if a comet approached nearer the sun, or swung by some high gravity planet, it might break up into a few smaller comets along the way. An example of a recent famous comet that broke up is Shoemaker Levy 9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9
- bookofjoe 8y agoHeechee