This Asteroid Shouldn’t Be Where Astronomers Found It | Hacker News Reader

This Asteroid Shouldn’t Be Where Astronomers Found It

nytimes.com

39 pointsmontrose13 comments

Interesting how the New York Times is following the Taboola-like structure of clickbaity headlines. Maybe it's where the money is after all.

I'd love to read this page, but my subconscious won't allow me to follow a link with that title.

Like all articles about space, the headlines was 1000 x more exciting than the contents.

It was worth the click to get to the article's embedded link to this article about the "Grand Tack" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jupiter-destroyer...

I've often wondered: is it possible for a grouping of asteroids to have a highly elliptical orbit and pass Earth's distance to the sun very infrequently, say every X million years?

Is it possible that there is some very regular chance that the Earth would get pummelled, but only on extremely long time spans? How would we know or not know?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long-period_comets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_near-parabolic_comets

The grouping is hard to figure out, as gravity would likely pull them together. But if a comet approached nearer the sun, or swung by some high gravity planet, it might break up into a few smaller comets along the way. An example of a recent famous comet that broke up is Shoemaker Levy 9.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9

Isn't that pretty much the orbit of a comet?

I think many that we know about have orbits in the thousands of years or less, with some known in the millions. But would it be possible for a huge grouping or sequence of them to maintain such an orbit together?

Meteorite showers are pretty much that, aren't they?

"The model astronomers had about where things should be had to be updated"

Heechee

Wasn't this on HN a few days ago?

Naughty asteroid!

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