Searches during twilight toward the Sun find several asteroids near Venus’ orbit | Hacker News Reader

Searches during twilight toward the Sun find several asteroids near Venus’ orbit

science.org

49 pointsrntn16 comments

Any astronomers or statisticians that can chime in here so I can know what my level of concern should be? Let's say on a scale from 'whatevs' to 'drop all hobbies so I can prep'.

The aliens are invading us.

Solid whatevs.

They're newly discovered, but they've been avoiding Earth for billions of years, and will continue to do so.

That's not a convincing argument. Jupiter is regularly hit by stuff that's been avoiding it for billions of years. (But "this trajectory doesn't ever cross Earth's orbit" is what we want here.)

What's interesting is that we can search and find stuff in that direction. Previously searches only looked outward away from the sun but theoretical earth grazing asteroids that spend most of their time less than 1 AU from the sun would not be picked up.

There have even been suggestions to send an asteroid searching telescope satellite to some lower orbit around the sun and use that vantage point to look outward towards earth and find anything there. Personally I still think we should do that too.

OK, a better version of my argument is that the fact that we've discovered these new asteroids doesn't mean the risk of disastrous asteroid impacts have gone up.

They were always there, and the trends of the last N million years will continue.

My concern would be that while the issue isn't with these specific asteroids, but rather that our ability to observe asteroids in general. How many other asteroids are we undercounting?

Yeah, these inner asteroids are in sort of a blind spot, so we won't get much warning if they one day smash into Buenos Aires.

Then again, even with a warning, there is very little we can do, aside from evacuate the target area.

Odd, that's not what the article says about their lifetime in those kinds of orbits.

These don't cross Earth's orbit (their orbits are completely interior to it), so they're a negligible threat.