Captured Comet Becomes Moon of Jupiter

An anonymous reader writes 'Jupiter's gravity captured a comet in the mid-20th century, holding it in orbit as a temporary moon for 12 years. The comet, named 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu, is the fifth body known to have been pulled by Jupiter from its orbit around the Sun. The discovery adds to our understanding of how Jupiter interferes with objects from the 'Hilda group,' which are asteroids and comets with orbits related to Jupiter's orbit.'

Comments

Good catch Jupiter

[moon3]

One can imagine that over billions of years Jupiter helped to clear-out our system from similar thrash pretty well.

Re:Good catch Jupiter

[Tablizer]

And if it wasn't there, we may not be here to wonder why.

Re:The comet's shape

[LaminatorX]

That was not an entirely settled matter when The Sentinel was written.

Re:But...

[SterlingSylver]

Well, it was for 12 years

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[Red Flayer]

NASA should be spending most - if not all - of its budget preparing to avert a comet/asteroid from hitting earth.

With all due respect, I disagree. Yes, some resources should be directed at that problem. But there is so much more that can and should be done by NASA. The Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer telescopes are a good example.

But what is the point in surviving if all we are doing is treading water? Sure we could spend billions on monitoring near space for potentially dangerous objects, but IMO we're better off spending those billions on things that can advance technology.

And in the (very) long run, our currently feeble attempts at space travel may lead to the best defense against catastrophic collisions -- another colonized planet.

Re:Is Jupiter gravity saving Earth?

[Wizard Drongo]

If you want to get truly pedantic, it'd be Iovian, since Latin lacks the letter "j"... But let's not quibble about details...

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[KeithJM]

Sorry, but how is colonizing another planet going to prevent a catastrophic collision?

Imagine when all of what would become the human race lived in one valley in Africa. One particularly harsh winter or dry summer could wipe out the whole species, right? If that happened today it might still be a catastrophe but humanity would go on. If we had self-sufficient colonies on other planets, an asteroid could destroy the earth without killing off humanity.

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[Sir_Lewk]

We are the first and only known organism that has the ability to improve the state of it's species. We have the ability to make ourselves great and prosper and you propose we do nothing more than simply survive. Take about underachievement.

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[yurtinus]

Except it's not a 1% chance. It's not a 1 in 500 chance. Extinction level impacts are a once in tens of millions of years event. I'm no astronomer, so have no ideas the difficulties involved in finding and tracking all NEOs-- but I do know that the effort involved for that is compounded by any number of objects that don't regularly live in our space. Essentially, you can never be 100% safe. I'm not saying do nothing, it's a mitigation versus aversion discussion. You can mitigate risks substantially where completely avoiding the risk is impossibly expensive.

Additionally-- impact events are only one of a myriad of potential calamities that we might face. Destabilization of the atmosphere (runnaway global cooling/warming), supervolcanoes, nearby gamma ray bursts, clathrate methane release, velociraptors, etcetc. You can't protect against everything, spending everything you have attempting to do so is just silly. Face it - Life is risky.