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A Hyper-Velocity Impact In the Asteroid Belt?
astroengine writes "Astronomers have spotted something rather odd in the asteroid belt. It looks like a comet, but it's got a circular orbit, similar to an asteroid. Whether it's an asteroid or a comet, it has a long, comet-like tail, suggesting something is being vented into space. Some experts think it could be a very rare comet/asteroid hybrid being heated by the sun, but there's an even more exciting possibility: It could be the first ever observation of two asteroids colliding in the asteroid belt."
Spock: Gas! Gas Captain.
A collision between asteroids? Who wants to bet a woman was driving one of them?
The Alpha Centari battlestar is venting waste prior to invasion...
They don't generally collide!? What about when the Millenium Falcon hid in one? Does that mean the Empire Strikes Back was all made up? Next thing you're going to tell me that there aren't giant space eels living in the bigger rocks. (Places fingers in ears and sings loudly Star Wars theme song)
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They just should have slammed down the 'Hyperspace' button...sigh...
What way did the other one go? Time to call Bruce Willis, methinks.
Silly spaceballs and their ludacris speed foiling our scientists and their methods.
So... did this collision send anything in our direction?
Seems to me that an asteroid collision would most likely produce lateral debris spray that would be more tangential to the orbit than perpendicular to it.
So what they are saying is comets usually orbit from the Oort cloud to the sun and back out again, while asteroids "usually" have a circular orbit as they are the left over bits from the solar systems creation and/or the by products of previous collisions between other asteroids. So there must be Nothing else flying around out there that may have both these characteristics?Nothing to see here, move along..
It's Nibiru and the Anunnaki are going to conquer Earth on Dec 21, 2012!
The Goa'uld are trying to kill us
It could also be that a spaceship has arrived in our solar system and they are using the asteroid belt to decelerate...
There's a reason you don't normally see icy bodies in circular orbits in the asteroid belt: they'd be blown clean of the ice within a fairly short period of time, astronomically speaking. that's what the tail consists of, dust embedded in the ice being released as the ice sublimes. Which means that the ice here has to have been exposed fairly recently.
It is well known that when rebels jump into hyperspace to escape the pursuing imperial battle cruisers, they might pop out in an asteroid belt. But most people think it is always possible to negotiate the craft around it and escape. Such false notions are strengthened by reports of more manuevrable craft deliberately entering asteroid belts to escape pursuit. But they don't always succeed and they might actually collide with an asteroid. The danger has always been there.
Also there is an even more exciting possibility of cave dwelling gigantic worms that live in these asteroids might once in a while actually close their mouths well in time to trap the unwary spacecraft and digest the contents. The by products of such digestion are usually ejected with high velocity and can be seen for millions of miles. True Story.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What exactly do they mean by hyper-velocity? Are we witnessing a collision between two objects whose velocities add up to more than the speed of light? Eg. one coming in from the left at 3/4c and one coming in from the left at 3/4c.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Han said ..."Without precise calculations... we'd fly right through a star, bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Subby, what the fuck is so hard about forming a complete sentence? If you're going to resort to a lame ass question headline, could you at least make it a question that ASKS SOMETHING?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
can you possibly understand what grave implications this has in store for superman? the kryptonite is coming!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does it happen to look like a Big Boy statue? Maybe it's Dr. Evil coming back.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Their asteroid belt is dynamic and exciting, and filled with hungry, hungarian space eels in hovercrafts!
What?! Someone was going to do this sooner or later... Don't kill the messenger!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
How is an asteroid collision more exciting than some kind of funky, very rare asteroid/comet hybrid?
Seriously...not anything big but something Tunguska sized would do, especially over a moderately populated area.
We spend peanuts on detecting potential collisions that could be the cause of the next extinction event. Mark my words, there'll be more money spent on earthquake analysis for Haiti and other "sensational" causes than will be spent on detecting PHOs (potentially hazardous objects) in the next 10 years. I am not denigrating the need to spend money on Haiti - that's a tragedy for sure - but when you look at how reactive we are with public money (New Orleans, anyone? Despite warnings, no one saw this coming?) when a much smaller amount spent up-front would potentially save not just a lot more lives but a lot more money....if better building codes had been in force in Haiti - how many more people would have survived? How much money would have been saved?
I despair for our race. If we saw a dinosaur killer coming and had a program in place already we could probably survive it. Asteroids move slowly but are heavy and require a lot of time/energy to deflect so we would see them early and be able to react...comets move much, much faster but are lighter so presumably if we had the detection gear and a few mass drivers in space already, we could deal with it in a safe time frame.
So give us our Haiti or Katrina from space, please. Make it hurt but not too much - just enough to wake up the people handing out government cash.
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
Everyone knows the asteroids pass right through each other. It's either been shot or it has collided with a ship.
Honestly, what kind of education are scientists getting these days?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I forgot where I parked my ship, and now some idiot has ran into it... again!
My insurance agent has no sense of humor. (Or sense of smell for that matter.)
Guess I'll have to cut my anthropological survey of indigenous primitives short to deal with this. =:-(
(Hey! You with the butterfly net, just calm down and take a seat, it's a joke. Yes, that's right, a joke, much like you. Only humans and really good chat-bots ever post to slashdot.)
Scenario 1: Asteroid strike. I defer to NASA JPL, the Tunguska event (100-meter class = ~ 15 mil tons TNT) asteroid occurs once or twice / 1000 years. A 1000-meter class is 1 in 15 million years. An 8000-meter class (dinosaur killer) is 1 in 50-100 million years.
Scenario 2: Earthquake. San Francisco has an annual forecast of earthquake probabilities, and they predict a 68% probability of a 6.7 Magnitude or greater in the next 30 years. Wikipedia gives a probability scale for earthquakes, where a Magnitude 7 (similar to what struke Haiti) occurs 18 / year. A single 6.7 earthquake (P = 120/year) is equivalent to 16 kilotons of energy, or about 1 Tungaska event (P = 0.004/year).
Given the disparity in the probability of asteroid strikes (on populated areas, no less) vs earthquakes, it should be no surprise that the world governments believe money is better spent on earthquake prediction and evacuation relief, not on asteroid strike detection. The "bang for the buck" is clearly higher in earthquake spending.
Well, where do you think baby asteroids come from?
Someone achieved to capture it on video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZfsnA7dAHI
Unbelievable. I wonder what that thing in the middle is...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I wonder if it's something braking before it gets into the inner planets...