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Did you hear the SWOOSH?

#1
Magical Realist Offline
http://www.space.com/36514-asteroid-2014...bcast.html

"An asteroid will make a close flyby of Earth today (April 19), and the Slooh Community Observatory will be tracking the space rock's journey live.

During the close approach, the asteroid will be traveling at about 73,000 miles per hour (117,000 kilometers per hour) and will come to within 4.6 times the distance between Earth and the moon, or about 1.1 million miles (1.6 million km).

Slooh.com will host a webcast beginning at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) showing live views of asteroid 2014 JO25 on the day of its close pass by Earth. The webcast will also feature Slooh astronomers and other experts, who will discuss how the asteroid was discovered and how humans could stop a massive asteroid from hitting Earth. You can watch the webcast on the Slooh website here. Although the webcast begins at 7 p.m. EDT, the asteroid's closest approach will occur earlier in the day, at about 8:24 a.m. EDT (1224 GMT). Slooh's flagship telescope in Spain's Canary Islands, off the west coast of northern Africa, won't be able to see the asteroid during the day. [Photos: Asteroids in Deep Space."
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#2
C C Offline
   

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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
When I read about this stuff I can't help but imagine how many times the same scenario has played out over billions of years. Hard to think that there's still original pieces of the universe still floating around out there. I wonder how much the inevitability factor increases with every miss. The cosmos' version of Russian Roulette. It's totally amazing to think that life may own it's existence to collisions or that life even survives the most colossal of all strikes. 

I don't know the answer but do all these asteroids that fly through regions of our solar system gain in size or become smaller with each pass?
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#4
C C Offline
(Apr 20, 2017 04:13 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: I don't know the answer but do all these asteroids that fly through regions of our solar system gain in size or become smaller with each pass?


In contrast to comets, rocky asteroids tend to lose mass from collisions rather than bleeding off frozen volatiles in vapor trails. A small percentage of collision-grinding dust contributes to the Zodiacal light. Some of the icier trans-Neptunian objects (if qualifying as asteroids) are too far away from the sun to warm. Any of those bodies large enough to produce geological eruptions may not allow much of the plumes' material to escape into space.

There's very little if any accretion today resulting from sticky collisions and gravitational attraction, compared to the early environment of the solar system. 99% of the original mass of the Asteroid and Kuiper belts is absent (the equivalent of "missing white woman" tabloid attention for theorists).
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