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Video Showing Half a Million Asteroid Discoveries
An anonymous reader writes "Since 1980 over a half million asteroids have been discovered, mostly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, now thanks to this video you can see this activity condensed into a few minutes. At full resolution it's a mesmerizing experience as new discoveries are added and the video makes it possible to see patterns in the discovery positions, for example a large number appear in line between Earth and Jupiter as astronomers started looking for smaller jovian moons after Voyagers visit to the system."
Anybody else getting dizzy?
Celebrating 30 years of counting rocks in space. Here's looking at you, kid.
Since 1980 over a half million asteroids have been discovered, mostly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
Between Mars and Jupiter, huh? You mean right where the asteroid belt is? And there are asteroids in it? Wow.
?? :/
I removed the One ring, why does Sauron still taunt me?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Is there a caption or story behind this ? I have worked on asteroids, and I have no real idea what is being portrayed.
My guess is that they are actually showing observations, not discoveries, as the flashing dots seem to be mostly in opposition, but a description would be useful.
It's interesting how the video highlights the fact that the bulk of the asteroids seem to be discovered in a direction of the earth's orbit opposite the sun. Seems obvious when you think about it, but it really becomes apparent from watching the vid.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
I'm wondering why I see no conspicuous clustering at the trojan points of Earth and Venus. Are asteroids there harder to detect?
We don't need yet another new programming language. Let's just pick an existing language and fix its flaws.
If the video is showing meteors in their orbits it appears that we might have to question the validity of calling Mars and Earth planets. It looks like neither planet really meet the guideline of "clearing its neighborhood"...
This past couple of decades has certainly been an age of discovery that equals if not surpasses a similar expansion of knowledge about the universe that happened in the 15th-18th Centuries when knowledge about new continents and islands became common place throughout most of the world. Most of us have been doing mundane things and living our lives, but this is certainly something that deserves note. More planets are also being discovered, including asteroid belts in other star systems as well.
What isn't being said here is how big some of these objects that are being discovered now: Most of the new objects being discovered are about the size of a house or sometimes even smaller. They really aren't all that large, even though if one of them hit your house it would make a bad day for you.
In a couple cases, there have been objects "rediscovered" that are suspected of being space junk left over from human exploration of space, such as spent stages from Saturn V rockets in solar orbit or other spacecraft that are not merely orbiting the Earth. What we will find out by doing a closer examination of these objects will be as interesting as anything else in human history, as at the moment most of this is merely discovering that something is there and not really understanding a whole lot about what it is that is moving around in that orbit. I suspect that the next several decades are going to be involved with cataloging and classifying these asteroids to understand what kind of resources are "out there".
Nice, but it's just a shame there isn't a caption or something else to indicate how much time has passed... :)
Do you have any better hostages?
Someone just faked that whole thing taking a fraps video of Osmos.
For a potential video game. You pilot a small spaceship, and your job is to shoot asteroids with your laser cannon as they appear. When an asteroid is hit, it breaks into several smaller asteroids. You then have to shoot those asteroids until they break up into asteroids so small that they are no longer a danger. If an asteroid impacts your spaceship, you die.
I think they should call it The Ship that Shoots a Laser Cannon.
Watching that video is incredibly cool and the geek in my is really impressed with it on many levels. I must admit, however, I also find it kinda scary. I guess ignorance is bliss - I know that there are a ton of rocks floating around out there but seeing it graphically presented like that just makes me think it's damn lucky we haven't be pulverized into the stone age...
I'm going to focus, instead, on just how cool it was because, really, it was damn cool.
It's full of rocks!
Did you work as a miner? Shuttle pilot? What??
No sig today...
Lookie, you heathen scum! Creationism is vindicated! What's that you see glimmering by the end of the video? It's the eye of God!!! That proves He exists. Y'all scientists done hoist yerselves by your own atheistic little petards, aincha? Gaze into His ocular glory, that greenish, ominous, malevolent, downright wicked...hey wait a second, you're not fooling me, you used summa that false color tricknology to make Him look evil didn't ya?
Next time show us His true colors -- red, white and blue.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Very creepy...
I hadn't quite finished this, I wanted to record a voiceover, but a friend submitted it before I was ready.
So essentially the video shows asteroids which are known, so in the early portions around 1980 we have less than 10,000 and by the start of this month we have over half a million. Asteroids are highlighted on discovery and within a second they fade to the colour appropriate to their orbit (Green, Yellow and Red), asteroids are usually observed intensely around discovery and once an orbit is determined observers can go back and follow up to refine the exact elements, I only show the discovery, not follow up measurements. This does mean that a number of the objects that are being plotted have orbits that may be so poorly determined that they are 'lost in space' because they were only observed for a short time and by the time people attempted to follow up they were lost.
At the start of the videos, the 1980's, CCD's weren't used for astronomy, photographic plates were the primary technology for imaging the sky, furthermore, there were no digital systems for identifying asteroids on these plates, so while many asteroids were no doubt imaged they were generally not of interest to the observers who were probably taking nice pictures of nebula or other photogenic phenomena. Many of the discoveries in the 1980's were still made visually by minor planet hunters who knew what they were looking for. One of the earliest 'bursts' in the video is most likely related to observations of Jupiter searching for new moons around the giant planet, they'd look for objects moving on the plates and then make an orbit determination to see if it was a moon, it's waaaaay cooler to find a moon since they're a rarer commodity, but if you merely find an asteroid at least you get a chance to name it.
By the time we get to the mid 1990's we start to see automated sky search programmes like LINEAR, LONEOS, Spacewatch and the Catalina Sky Survey and these are primarily searching for asteroids in opposition since they're closer to Earth and at peak brightness so you can see a discovery cluster radiating out from the Earth.
In the last 8 months you see WISE which is a satellite performing a full sky survey in the Infrared, its scans the sky at 90 degrees to the sun, so its discovery pattern is very distinctive.
Unless they're red
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
There's lots of rocks out there. I wonder how much mass they all add up to. The theory in The Twelfth Planet ( http://www.amazon.com/12th-Planet-Earth-Chronicles-Book/dp/038039362X ), which sounds a bit farfetched since the author states it is gathered from ancient tablets that were dictated to us by aliens, is something like: There was a big planet around where Earth is now. This 12th planet (Moon, Sun + Pluto also being 'planets') with a 3600-year orbit came into our solar system and came really close to it. I think the moon split off from it, then another moon, which shattered to become this asteroid belt, and what was left (with the modified orbit) was Earth. Other pieces that broke off from the planet were flung away and became comets. This is all from memory, so it might not be accurate. Interesting theory, though.
I wonder what seasons are where. I noticed that there were few discoveries towards the top and bottom of the video near the beginning. Then later on, discoveries near the top became more common, but even to the end, discoveries near the bottom were rare, except for the WISE discoveries. It's like there's a 1 or 2 month period every year when all the discoveries stop. Why is that?
What keys do I press to select the BFG?
How big are these asteroids? They must be tiny on average otherwise I don't see how we can still be here. We are swimming in the things.
Also why hasn't the asteroid belt become a planet? What prevents the rocks for grouping together?
:T:R:A:N:S:
at least two [...] over the last billion years
So a few asteroid impacts every billion years or so? There are probably many other things that are more dangerous than that.
youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/v/S_d-gs0WoUw
downloads the highest quality version automatically.
Are there a shitload of asteroids zooming dangerously close in and out of our orbit?
What are those rocks made of? And given that their made from some heavy elements, what could either Venus, or Titan offer to lighten objects up?
Towards the end of the video, a lot of the asteroids seem to be detected on discrete shells--around half a doze equally spaced shells through the asteroid belt. Where does that structure come from? I assume it's an artifact of the measuring process.