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Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth
lmcl writes "New Scientist reports that an asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre. The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by."
a few days ago APOD had posted this picture. If this picture was taken recently, maybe the asteroid and the fireball are related.
She said "did you just feel the earth move?" - I thought I was good in bed.
But it was just an asteroid.
The previous record for closest approach of an asteroid - 108,000km measured from the centre of the Earth - was set in 1994 by another 10m object named 1994 XM1.
I heard the record for the closest approach of an asteroid was already set billions of years ago. Apparantly everything died or some freak catastrophe like that. Doesn't that still hold the world record?
Er-Um-I don't think so. Plenty of Asteroids have struck the Earth, and those are the degenerate case of "closest".
Did you really mean "Closest Asteroid of Significant Size since Hollywood Made Some Movies Recently About Asteroids Hitting the Earth and Wiping Out Humanity Yet Flies Past Earth"?
How else would I know when to begin the rabid orgy of drinking, sex, and general debauchery?
I would also note that the Indian event also appears to have consisted of at least two pieces (one of which is said to have done minor damage in a different village). I'm guessing that there are more pieces out there (smaller, perhaps, but out there).
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Through a study of physics, astronomy and cosmology.
The two objects had no relationship to each other. They were on totally dissimilar paths, made of different materials and of obvious divergent origin. In fact, only one of them was an asteroid.
An asteroid is orbital, just like a planet (asteroids are also called "minor planets"), and behaves like a planet. Once detected its behaviour is highly predictable.
The other was a meteor. Space junk. A rock. Very possibly a comet fragment but being hit by such a fragment means little about the odds of ever being hit by the comet it came from, which may well be tens of thousands of years away from coming anywhere near earth. There is a small army of astronomers, both professional and amatuer, watching for incoming comets because they're neat and get named after you if you see it first.
Tons of stuff falls on earth from space every day. It isn't indicitive of anything much other than there's lots of stuff out there and a lot of it hits us.
Some of the stuff that hits us is clearly related to other stuff that hits us.Meteor showers are such related stuff. Some of the stuff is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff.
These two things don't happen to have any relationship to each other, and thus have no joint relationship to some third object.
This is not to say that something big isn't on a collision course with earth at some future point. In fact such an event seems highly likely at some future time.
It just that these two unrelated events don't presage that.
Bummer, huh? You'll have to pay those credit card bills after all.
KFG
80,000 km is not the closest. How about the Grand Teton Meteor of 1972? This one was seen in the US and Canada as a bright daylight fireball. It was very close - about 50 km - but did not hit. Instead, it burned through the atmosphere and went off back into space.
Then there's this one, which is believed to be a meteor that was put into Earth orbit on the first pass, then re-entered 100 minutes later after orbiting the Earth once.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
(a ball of hydrogen which never got quite big enough to ignite, but which plays binary to the sun)
25 years ago this theory may have been worth spending time on, but technology has done a pretty good job of ruling it out since then (nothing is impossible, but its presence is highly unlikely).
The theory that a brown dwarf or Uranus to Jupiterian-sized planet could be orbiting beyond Pluto in a slow or elliptical orbit invisible to ground based visible light scopes is believable, but astronomy has moved well beyond visible light. We've scanned the sky in X-Ray, infrared, radio, and gamma ray, and haven't found ANYTHING resembling another planet or nearby star. Planets, especially gas giants, tend to be noisy and easily visible by radio, and ALL planetary bodies have some kind of infrared signature. If there were anything out there of any appreciable size, we'd have seen some sign of it by now.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.