Asteroid found on Sunday to skim past earth, May hit satellites!!!

when are we going to consider the possibility that someone is either drawing them near us or pushing them toward us?

Right, and is this one traveling with any friends???

We're on a giant billard table and the gods are playing pool.

To find them all would probably be impossible. We've probably only detected a minutely small percentage of the ones heading our way. One day, we'll all be taken by surprise by one and it will be Game Over.

Sounds about right, its just surprising that they just found this last weekend when it will be flying by on Sunday...Not a whole lot of prep time if it was a little closer.

No, not in that size class. It's only about 20 meters, we've only found a tiny percentage of asteroids that small.

A 20 meter asteroid's hill sphere would be so small that any companion would necessarily be orbiting it at an extremely low distance from it, if it could do so stably at all. That said, asteroids this small whiz by our planet all the time. One about half this size flew past on August 31st at a similar distance. There could just as easily be another out there in an unrelated orbit set to fly by the same day as well, maybe even hit us, it's all just a matter of chance. I'll try to webcast this one as it approaches our planet on Saturday night if the weather cooperates.

Last Edited by Astromut on 09/04/2014 03:34 PM

20 Metres would make a mess but not catastrophic if it hit, right?

Double post

Last Edited by Lime Flavoured Redux on 09/04/2014 03:37 PM

The Cheylabinsk meteor was approximately 20 meters in size, so if it hit a major city a lot of people could be injured by the blast and shrapnel from windows.

The solar system is not sitting static in a particular region of space. All of the planets are flying in a trail behind the sun, which is traveling at a rate of millions of miles per hour, into uncharted regions of space. There is no way to find all of these objects.

No, they're not. They're flying alongside the sun. So are the asteroids, like this one. We can see the orbit, it's not a hyperbolic object from outside the solar system.