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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.""
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
... 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.
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
1. There are more inter-system collisions than we realize. Example: Schoemaker-Levi
Data is not the plural form of anecdote.
The idea is that these collisions increase the number of asteroids that cross our orbit and can therefore have a chance of hitting us. It takes a while though. We don't really care about something that might hit us 160 million years from now. We care about something that might hit us say, this century. So we look at the ones that are already whizzing around in our neighborhood.