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.""

Comments

Re:hmm

[skoaldipper]

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?

No crap

[gerf]

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?

Re:No crap

[Arabani]

4. They predict an impact 160 million years ago, 95 million years off the mark. Example: Dino fossils are as new as 65 million. They believe that the BREAKUP occurred 160 million years ago, not whatever wiped out the dinosaurs. It takes time for things to move from the asteroid belt to the Earth, you know.

Re:No crap

[Anonymous Coward]

2. The Sun is bigger than Earth, and therefore would probably get hit 1000% (or more) more often. Example: eclipses show this quite easily It would be extraordinarily hard for any object to hit the Sun. Only if an object was heading directly for the Sun as it entered the Solar System gravity well or if it originally had an extremely eccentric orbit would it be able to hit the Sun. This point may not be obvious to those who haven't studied physics, but the Solar System is a gravity well. If your goal is to hit the Sun (i.e. to touch the atmosphere where you will be aerodynamically decelerated/toasted), then you need to give up a lot of energy. Probes like MESSENGER that want to go into orbit around Mercury need to use more fuel than they would to escape the Solar System entirely.

From your point of view as a comet or other object in elliptical orbit around the Sun, if you wanted to actually collide with the Sun you would need to strike an object such that it sent you into an elliptical orbit with such a high eccentricity that your orbit passed through the atmosphere of the Sun. The probability of that happening is extremely remote. The probability of sending a collided object through the orbits of any of the planets is not.

For objects that are not orbiting the Sun when they are approaching (and can't be captured without a collision with a third body), your direction of approach has to be so finely positioned that those mythical sniper shots at 1 mile or more look trivial. In no case will the Sun's gravity make a collision more probable (or in the other case).

Re:No crap

[barakn]

Eclipses show this quite easily? What the heck is that supposed to mean? And pork chop plots show how much energy it will take for a spacecraft to escape Earth's gravity, place it on a course to another object, and capture it into orbit upon arrival as a function of different launch and arrival dates. They are most definitely not, as you seem to imply, some sort of error estimate for orbital trajectories. It's sad that you've decided to try to cast aspersions on research done by the Southwest Research Institute, as it is highly regarded in the field, and you don't seem to know what you're talking about.

Re:No crap

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>We can't predict movement 10 years from now

NASA does it all the time for deep space probes, Halley's Comet returns are predicted many orbits in advance, and in general celestial mechanics is one of the most exact predictive disciplines. Even tiny deviations, such as those of Mercury's orbit (56 arc seconds per year!), are considered grounds for revising theories of gravity.

Re:No crap

[1u3hr]

2. The Sun is bigger than Earth, and therefore would probably get hit 1000% (or more) more often. Example: eclipses show this quite easily

WTF does an eclipse show? I hope you're not talking about sunspots, which have nothing to do with asteroids. 4. They predict an impact 160 million years ago, 95 million years off the mark.

RTFA. There was a series of impacts over millenia, Yucatan being the biggest, but not the first. Many of the earth grazers we see now may have originated in the same event.

At least I haven't seen any Global Warming scarey articles in a while. Maybe the Firehose is working afterall?

It's not news when it's a known fact. Seeing as how you willfully misinterpreted this article, I'm not surprsed you remain confused about that too.

Re:No crap

[Goaway]

You have just accused an entire field of science of being nothing but liars.

Do you have the kind of evidence needed to back up a claim like that?

Gap in asteroid tracking data -- Earth at risk?

[abbamouse]

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.

Re:hmm (It's called the Scientific Method, Moron)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The Problems with Tycho as an Impact Crater

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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).