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I've read somewhere that we now have a ton of junk satellites orbiting earth, and if they happen to crash into each other it could set off a chain reaction that creates a satellite-debris shell around the entire earth, roughly resembling a non-rigid sphere. Is that true?

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That's roughly the story in the movie Gravity.

Collisions between orbital junk are most likely to happen between objects in the same orbit. And most junk is in some roughly equatorial orbit. So I'd expect the resulting debris to end up in roughly the same orbit, so that the debris would form a sort of fuzzy disk - not a sphere. I wouldn't expect to observe much debris over the North Pole.

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