‘It snuck up on us’: Scientists stunned by ‘city-killer’ asteroid that just missed Earth [wp]
That happened the day after I posted the “astrology” image,[stderr] claiming that the stars and planetary bodies were not going to have any effect on the reader. Some of the commentariat rightly corrected me by pointing out that astrophysicists, astronauts, and people hit by asteroids need a separate entry.
This particular asteroid fell into the category of “too small to notice, but large enough to really fuck you up.”
“I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week.
Then, he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK.
“I was stunned,” he said. “This was a true shock.”
It would have been a perfect interruption for Robert Mueller’s testimony. Especially if it hit Washington.
According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”
That’s “Joe Biden uncomfortably close.”
Yeah, they have that little animation you can watch to see the trajectory approaching the Earth in its orbit, and it’s… whew.
Is that big enough that it would actually impact and not burn up in the atmosphere? I have no concept here.
Marshall@#2:
Is that big enough that it would actually impact and not burn up in the atmosphere? I have no concept here.
It’s about 3 times the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which released about a much energy as the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
If it had hit the Earth, it would have damaged something. If it landed near a city, or in the water near a city, it would have been a major disaster. It would have released about the same amount of energy as a 1 megaton nuke.
A hell of a surprise, and possibly the igniter for a nuclear war.
[For reference, the asteroid that hit Chixculub was about 11km – the size of Manhattan. It released the energy of about 300 million 1mt nukes.]
Given the resources we’ve spent on long-known existential threats like climate change and asteroid strikes, our species designation should be changed from sapiens to myops, or stultus.
Rob Grigjanis@#4:
I agree. Is stultus Latin for “dumbass”?
More or less.
Not necessarily – there’s a lot of ocean out there.
Chelyabinsk was initially estimated at 100kT (~6-8x Hiroshima), then revised upwards to 400-500kT (~30x Hiroshima. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor for details on damage/injuries.
2019 OK is at least 10x Chelyabinsk, is (probably) stony, and likely to break up in the atmosphere if it enters at a shallow angle, with an effect probably similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event. If it’s nickel-iron, or it enters steeply, then the result would be similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater.
@Marshall: As others pointed out, hard to say, It depends on the composition, speed and angle. From the data we have, I guesstimate “on land, it would have made quite a Bang! Bigger than Chelyabinsk but in no way a K-T Boundary-BÄM!*”
It’s all a fun game of orders of magnitude … .
Can’t have a dumb rock show off more megatons! We’ll show the world who’s the bangiest! USA! USA! US…!
(This also reminds me of the gamma ray detectors for monitoring nuclear explosions that then found cosmic gamma rqay bursts. I wonder how many in the echelons thought: “Huh? Russian bombs in deep space?”)
*Chixculub Impact.
Astrology claims that people’s lives are influenced by stars and planets. Asteroids are neither stars nor planets. Even if an asteroid hit us, the original claim that stars and planets won’t influence our lives still would remain true.
Although then again, the trajectory of some asteroid can be influenced by the gravity of some star or planet. So maybe it could be said that stars and planets will influence us indirectly through their gravity.
Marcus,
In terms of immediate devastation due to the energy release and its aftermath, an adequate comparison.
In terms of the release of nuclear fallout and its aftermath, not-so-much.
(They are not equivalent overall)
Andreas,
Or by outgassing from volatiles when sufficient energy reaches it, or by collisions. For example.
A gamma-ray burst sure would.
(Sorry, just having fun while not being wrong)
eh, if playing too much Kerbal space program has taught me anything, the difference between hitting a planet and flying off into interplanetary space is pretty small. call me when it’s actually going to hit the atmosphere
In Kerbal, you always know the exact speed and trajectory of every object. Reality is not quite as accommodating.
I think #13’s point is that missing by 45,000 miles, 6 diameters, looks scary as hell in an animation but is not in fact that close. God is gonna have to pitch a hell of a lot better than that.
I will note that a disk of radius 49,000 miles (“the target”) around a planet of radius 4000 miles (“the bullseye”) is about 1/150th bullseye.
God doesn’t have to exactly hit the bullseye, but he’s got to get pretty close.
Damn you autocorrect. Good = God. now = note. Also, I can edit comments on ESR’s blog. Yes. That guy. Has a better platform. Holy shit, right?
Andrew Molitor@#16:
Yes. That guy. Has a better platform. Holy shit, right?
Fixed your corrections.
I think the FTB instance of wordpress is pretty old. We haven’t had a lot of blog-wars over here at stderr but editing is a popular weapon of trolling and spamming. (post a comment, get it approved, then back-edit spam into it) I prefer to be lazy and not have that problem.
I think there existed WordPress plugins that allowed comment editing for a couple minutes after a comment was posted. All the people who notice a typo in their own comment usually do so a minute after clicking “post,” so that would be a potential solution.
Overall, I think that allowing unrestricted comment editing is too risky. Majority of people want to edit typos in their comments, but a few trolls and spammers do exist. They are a much bigger nuisance than the existence of a few uncorrected typos. The latter usually do not disturb readers’ understanding of what the commenters wanted to say, and if some typo is so bad as to hinder comprehension, one can always type another comment with a clarification.
When designing my own website’s commenting system, I didn’t get far beyond the basics. Some commenting plugins violate their user’s privacy (like Disqus), others seemed to get good reviews but were expensive. Ultimately I just decided that for now I’ll postpone any attempts to figure out something better.
Yeah, I think the “short window for edits” is about right. It seems to be human nature, or at least my nature, to not see some typos until I bash “post.” So, yeah, my problem, etc.
Thanks for back-propagating my corrections!
The way FTB is implemented, it’s an ad-hoc multi-blog framework; I think it’s wordpress that had the main page and sidebars hammered on by ${someone}. We’ve had problems when someone has added a plugin or whatnot and it breaks the other blogs. I do not want to be the bringer of catastrophe.
[I just checked: we can’t even upload plugins, so far as I can tell. I am not touching this.]