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Hole in Asteroid Belt Reveals Extinction Asteroid
eldavojohn writes "Further evidence for the asteroid mass extinction theory has been discovered as a break in the main asteroid belt of our solar system. From the article, "A joint U.S.-Czech team from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles University in Prague suggests that the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina disrupted when it was hit by another large asteroid, creating numerous large fragments that would later create the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the prominent Tycho crater found on the Moon.""
Timing is everything, which is the main thrust of this article I gather, linking that event to interesting moon and earth geological formations during the same epoch.
But, if Chicxulub was the 8 ball, and Baptistina the combo shot, I was left wondering at the end of my reading, what was the cue ball, and where was the pool stick? Of more concern, when does the best 2 out of 3 match take place?
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Let's get some logic here:
1. There are more inter-system collisions than we realize. Example: Schoemaker-Levi
2. The Sun is bigger than Earth, and therefore would probably get hit 1000% (or more) more often. Example: eclipses show this quite easily
2.a Corollary: The Sun is the center of the Solar System, not Earth. Example: Copernicus
3. The big Yucatan collision happened millions of years ago, and since then things have moved a bit. We can't predict movement 10 years from now, much less 160 Million. Example: We still use Pork-Chop plots at NASA
4. They predict an impact 160 million years ago, 95 million years off the mark. Example: Dino fossils are as new as 65 million.
Overall, this isn't the most reliable of links and summaries in recent /. history. At least I haven't seen any Global Warming scarey articles in a while. Maybe the Firehose is working afterall?
I wonder if this means that our current strategy of tracking asteroids to see if they will impact Earth is the wrong one. Perhaps no asteroids "naturally" hit Earth on their present trajectories. If it takes a collision within the asteroid belt to throw out material that impacts Earth, maybe we should be trying to track the movements of large asteroids to see if they will intersect EACH OTHER rather than Earth.
I may be misunderstanding the data, and I would never change policy based on a single study, but this suggests that a more sophisticated approach is needed to detect potential impactors.
Make cheese not war 8:)
Do I really have to post anything but my modification to the title of original post? This is Slashdot,the home of snotty nerds who know almost nothing, and love to belittle their intellectual superiors, so I guess I have to spell it out.
Scientists look at facts and make hypothesis. They publish the ideas and facts that support them, and other scientists read them and add information that either supports or refutes the hypothesis. The sum total of knowledge increases over time.
The authors of the paper were doing simulations of asteroid dynamics. They found a possible event in the asteroid belt that may explain a known increase in meteor impacts in the inner solar system. They noted that this hypothesis fits in with two known large meteors, the proposed dinosaur extinction event and the moon crater Tycho. Their simulations add support to the earth impact hypothesis and the earth impact data indirectly supports their claim. This is how science works.
So how is this only a 'suggestion' with no real 'facts' to support it? I suggest that you 'get back to me' when you grow up and understand how intelligent people do real scientific inquiry. I know your little wee-wee got all hard when you had a chance to make a first post and trash some adults, but it just makes you look like a spoiled and nasty little child. Perhaps if you ever do anything useful in your life your attitude will change, but somehow I doubt that will ever happen.
We've actually witnessed collisions in space. And found evidence on earth for them. We've never seen any evidence for electrical arcs between heavenly bodies that would cause craters. So that at least implies that they are more rare, if they are possible. scientists discount interpretations of observations that are not supported by other observations. That is it. Only when an event cannot be explained by any existing model formed from previous observations, will they resort to wild guessing ( see string theory, multiple universe theory, etc).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This is a sign of something more. The overall lack of basic logic capability (on /. as well as in real life) is just a fact. I see it every morning when I enter my office and open my mail box. It is fascinating to see educated people telling me for instance that you do not need any documentation and review process on (software) enginering projects. It is just a question of time to see them looking for reasons of failure. Surprisingly this reason is either aliens from outer space or the messangers.
Of course one shall never confuse simple incompetence and lack of knowledge with stupidity and bad will. The former can be eradicated the later not.
No. The problem is the electric universe stuff attracts cranks and crackpots. No astrophysicist believes that electrical effects are insignificant in the universe - they spend most of their time doing magnethydrodynamic investigation, for god's sake. But when some anti-relativity nut latches on, and some anti-quantum nut and all the other nuts, it drags credibility through the mud. Really, you're wasting your time listening to hangers-on and wannabees clustering around the electric universe web site.
Atheism is not a religion any more than accounting is a religion.
I take it you've never had to turn in an expense report.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
If you want strangers to think you are smart, just remember to label an ongoing topic of discussion as Sensationalism, and link it to a list of other subjects that you sarcastically mark as "Hot Topics".
That way, your destructive attitude (similar in many ways to the destructive force of the asteroids in the topic) will make you *appear* like you actually know something.
Now, I'm sure that you read the friggin article. Since none of us were there to see the impact in the asteroid belt, you are correct in that there *is* speculation involved. However, it is pretty obvious that it is not PURE speculation, since they are using researched information to form their theory. They quite openly talk about the percentages of probability of the events having happened as they described them, thus stating that although they believe things happened the way they have figured it out, it is possible that they are wrong. But they did not speculate on the composition of what hit us. They did not speculate on the composition of other objects we have been hit by. They did not speculate on the frequency that we have been getting hit with objects. They did not speculate on where we were hit by the one that most likely killed the dinosaurs. They are using some speculation as to the date we were hit, but they are using data that puts it at around the right time for an extinction level event.
So throwing around a phrase like "Pure Speculation" is pure ignorance. You are just looking to get a slice of that coverage with your "Pshaw. They ain't knowin diddly. They jus lookin fer money an 'tenshun, ah reckon." shtick.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
Me thinks you mean Minerva.
From the physorg write up,
If you don't understand why this juxtaposition is funny, then you're not qualified to make fun of anyone's scientific research.