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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.""
a break in the main asteroid belt of our solar system
The Flying Spaghetti Monster was making meatballs gets my vote.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Ok lets all hope we don't get another visit from the hit men of our solar system, the Baptistina family.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
... then make a Slashdot account and submit it there. You caught me. Oh how you've ruined years of careful plotting and planning. I am not eldavojohn, I am actually a Czech researcher named Dr. David Vokrouhlicky. I have slowly been posting careful karma whoring posts and submitting story after story all in the name of eventually publishing my research and getting it on the front page of Slashdot.Yes, it was a long arduous endeavor. Gaining people's trust, making foes of others. It was an ingenious plan to boost the popularity and public acceptance of my paper
Well, the gig is up, that hole was actually created by Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak. Ohhh, no, I've wasted my life! Who would have thought such a ridiculously elaborate and circuitous plan to tilt the scientific world towards accepting my theories based on computer models could have been foiled by an internet user named Cheezymadman!?
My work here is dung.
It didn't create sunspots and the Great Red Spot? I think these folks are not imaginative enough.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
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:)
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).
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.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
>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.
1. There are more inter-system collisions than we realize. Example: Schoemaker-Levi
Data is not the plural form of anecdote.
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.
For a bit of fun when I was running my solar system model a while back I tried to hit Sol with an asteroid. Its rather tricky, but it can be done if the velocity is low enough and you contrive an orbit. It's virtually impossible, at least I never managed it, to slingshot an object around one of the inner planets and hit the sun.
Yes, yes, I'm a geek, I have no life, I really spent days doing this [/sob]
There's the other thing though, define 'impact'. Most comets are icy, many asteroids are ice and shale. Put those close to the sun and you get vapour, and no more comet/asteroid. That would be an impact. my software can't do such things, but I probably got a few impacts of this type.
Incidentally altering the mass of the sun up to the Chandrasekhar limit doesn't mean any of the planets collapse into the sun, they all get ejected. Neptune gets into an orbit so elliptical and fast that I believe it would be stripped to whatever is at its core before it was finally ejected.
You beat me to the pool analogy punch.
I was going to say, "Einstein was right, God doesn't play dice. He plays pool. Third planet, corner pocket!"
FLR
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?