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Latest Earth-Crossing Asteroid Passes by Tonight
jc42 writes "Astronomers have been looking at the first images of asteroid 2007 TU24, the 250-meter asteroid that will pass 540,000 km from the Earth at 8:33 UTC (3:30 EST) Tuesday morning. So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches. It might be sobering to consider that it was just discovered last October, and we know about maybe half of the objects like this in Earth-crossing orbits."
The problem is that when you say something is 540,000km away, the huge general population tunes out. That's an ASTRONOMICAL number by most considerations, so nobody gives two shits. Except, as it turns out, we're dealing with astronomy, so astronomical numbers are the norm. The fact that nobody is really considering funding a worldwide effort to try and map all the objects that could potentially cause a major threat is disturbing. Hillary voted for $1 Million for a Woodstock museum - doesn't it make more sense to fund a huge, cheap project that could potentially help save the entire Earth from annihilation than a museum about a rockin' sex-fest? The latter doesn't really seem up most of congress' alley, but yet they vote that way.
NASA needs to spearhead projects that are useful, in collaboration with the rest of the space-viewing world. The fact that there isn't a loud voice shouting about this concept to the pols is embarrassing.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
From TFA:
"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this, and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen before," said Mike Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Arecibo Observatory. "We really haven't sampled the population enough to know what's out there."
Verbum caro factum est
If a house has five rooms, and after throughly searching one of the rooms you find two spiders, it's a reasonable guess that there are 10 spiders in the house. This is based on the assumption that the room you searched isn't "Jesus's magical spider room" but is in fact an average, typical room. The average number of spiders per room might be a little higher or a little lower than the one room you searched, but it wont be off by far. It's very unlikely that there are 100 spiders in all the other rooms, for example.
We know what area of the sky has been throughly searched for asteroids. QED.
But wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that the spiders would be more numerous the closer you get to the mechanism by which they're able to enter your house? In that case, assuming you don't actually know how they're getting into the house, you could draw no conclusion at all from looking at just one room.
No, your analogy is terrible. Since this is Slashdot, what we really need in order to properly visualize this is a bad car analogy, thusly:
Let's say you're walking down a standard neighborhood street, and you count 5 cars parked on the side of the road. With this information, you can easily extrapolate out that if there are 50 other streets in your neighborhood, there must be 250 cars in the neighborhood that you haven't yet seen. Cars that you see actually moving down the street are just chaotic side effects of the car phenomenon, and can safely be discarded from the analysis.
Or, perhaps a more accurate, but still poor, car analogy: If scientists have scanned half the sky at random, and have discovered around 5,000 cars hurtling toward Earth, they can reasonably state that there are probably around 10,000 cars hurtling toward Earth at any given moment. However, even if they're completely wrong, it's probably best to keep an eye out for falling cars.
So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches
Don't bother holding your breath. At magnitude 10.3 it's too dim to see without a telescope to gather extra light. By a factor of 50 or so (even on a clear dark sky).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What do you choose to spend your money on?
Think real hard about this now. We've had a comet smack into Jupiter not too long ago, leaving lasting marks. We've had smaller objects hit the earth before, like the Tunguska event. Hello? Hint?
It was nice knowing us!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
they based it on the rate at which we find new ones compared to the volume of space and some other stuff. So it's a pretty good estimation. To estimate we found "all of them" we'd have to have not found any for like 500 years or something.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
- 10th magnitude? A bit of a reach for my 90mm scope, especially with light pollution.
- Forecast is cloudy with rain/snow. Won't see the sky anyway.
- I live in Minnesota and it's January -- c-c-c-c-old!
- 2:30am CST on a weeknight? I have a job! That's past my bedtime.
I did catch an asteroid once, and it was kinda cool. Using a map of the asteroid's path, I set up the scope on some recognizable stars and waited for it. It looked like a faint speck moving against the background. Not sure it's worth the trouble for a second look.I might be indecisive, but I'm not really sure. What do you think?
I don't know if you're serious or not but I've seen enough of people who actually think that a collision could be kept secret that I'll reply. Even if the all of the professional astronomers who've calculated the orbit of 2007 TU24 kept their mouths shut, there's still hundreds of amateurs out there who have the capability to measure this object's orbit with enough precision to know whether or not it's going to hit us. You wouldn't be able to get them to keep their mouths shut.
I could get on with the raping and looting.
Someone hates these cans.