4 ms·
It was discovered 8 hours ago! I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, I'm super excited that we can go from discovery to wide dissemination within
by koliber 2y ago
It was discovered 8 hours ago!
I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, I'm super excited that we can go from discovery to wide dissemination within a few hours. On the other hand, what's the chance of something like this happening with a much bigger asteroid.
- rogerrogerr 2y agoWe’d at least see them earlier, because much bigger asteroids are much bigger.
- ben_w 2y ago> On the other hand, what's the chance of something like this happening with a much bigger asteroid. Lower. As size increases there are fewer bigger asteroids to begin with, and they are also easier to spot.
- davidcuddeback 2y ago> On the other hand, what's the chance of something like this happening with a much bigger asteroid. Bigger asteroids are easier to see.
- ithkuil 2y agothat's right. another metric that affects the ... impact ... of such an event is also the speed of the asteroid. Unlike size, I suspect higher speeds would make it harder to spot (and once spotted there would be less time to take action)
- BurningFrog 2y agoAsteroids are just as visible at any speed. Though warning times will be shorter the higher the relative speed is.
- bumby 2y agoI think the OPs point was: If we are only surveying a portion of the sky at a time and a faster asteroid spends less time traversing that portion, the likelihood of detection is lower.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoFaster asteroids leave longer streaks.
- krisoft 2y agoI'm not sure if you are joking. Assuming you are not. What kind of "streak" you are thinking about? Are you thinking about comets with their tails? Or motion blur? Because if motion blur I would expect an asteroid on a collision course to have none. (at least in the short timeframe before the collision) Because "Constant bearing, decreasing range" is how a collision looks like from a first person perspective.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoYour last paragraph is correct, but only very close to the collision. Things in orbit around the sun don't move in straight lines, even if their paths are going to intersect. The earlier you see it, the less it's moving straight at you. (Of course, if it's going to hit you, the faster it's going, the more straight at you its path is at the same distance. But for the same amount of "not straight at you", faster leaves a bigger streak.)
- ithkuil 2y agoYeah given that were talking about objects that are colliding with the earth, the faster they will come closer to us the less time we'll have to spot them
- morning-coffee 2y ago> On the other hand, what's the chance of something like this happening with a much bigger asteroid. The same as it's always been, which is to say you can live your life without worrying about it. If our technology advances such that we can observe/find more and more of these, that doesn't affect the chances that a particularly sized asteroid hits the earth or not.
- sandworm101 2y ago>> such that we can observe/find more and more of these, that doesn't affect the chances that a particularly sized asteroid hits the earth or not. Maybe under classical rules, but we know know that the act of observation collapses the range of possible outcomes, potentially locking us into a collision by an asteroid that previously existed only as a probability cloud.
- dmd 2y agoThat's not how any of this works.
- ivanjermakov 2y agoAs far as we know, quantum effects do not apply to big space rocks
- whimsicalism 2y ago?? quantum effects apply to everything, but for large objects the expectation is classical
- krisoft 2y agoCurious use of the double questions marks when the following sentence reveals that seemingly you did understand the point the commenter was making.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- m4rtink 2y agoBigger object should reflect more light, making detection more likely. In very simplified terms, say its roughly spherical, the amount of light grows with the second exponent, so twice bigger object reflect 4 times as much light - but it is also potentially 8 times as heavy (eq. volume grows with third exponent) & thus more dangerous. Trade-offs. :)
- krisoft 2y ago> Bigger object should reflect more light, making detection more likely. That assumes that the detection is photon constrained and not "nobody is looking in most directions" constrained. It doesn't matter even if the asteroid is carrying a lit magnesium torch if nobody is looking for it systematically. I'm not saying that it is the case. In fact I'm asking: are we photon constrained or are we constrained by the rate we are scanning the sky?
- svachalek 2y agoBoth, but in practice the coverage of dangerous sized objects is pretty good already and when the Vera Rubin Observatory goes online it will get an order of magnitude better.
- leke 2y agoYep, it could be that one day you go to work and your town gets destroyed before you manage to get home and hug your family goodbye.
- exitb 2y agoAccording to NASA [1], asteroid needs to be larger than 25 meters to cause localized damage. It’d need to be larger than 1-2km to cause globally observable consequences. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-facts/ https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...
- pdonis 2y ago> what's the chance of something like this happening with a much bigger asteroid. Negligible. As I noted upthread, objects large enough to be do significant damage if they hit Earth and are on trajectories that could bring them close to Earth are routinely spotted years in advance.