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30 years, half a million asteroids.
#1
30 years, half a million asteroids.
Just how empty is our solar system? Well, we have 8 planets, one star, a fair few dwarf planets and comets. Oh, and more than half a million asteroids (discovered in the last 30 years):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw

I did the calculation. That is 45 asteroids discovered every single day.
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#2
RE: 30 years, half a million asteroids.
Noisy neighbours. Shake Fist
Best regards,
Leo van Miert
Horsepower is how hard you hit the wall --Torque is how far you take the wall with you
Pastafarian
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#3
RE: 30 years, half a million asteroids.
These asteroids could provide very valuable resources...I say we need more!
"God is dead" - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Faith is what you have in things that DON'T exist. - Homer J. Simpson
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#4
RE: 30 years, half a million asteroids.
Indeed. Our solar system is actually very quiet and cleared out compared to a few of our closest neighbors, like Vega and Epsilon Eridani, where the cometary and asteroid content is far higher due to being much younger solar systems.

But yes, I find it comforting that we're finding these things as fast as we are - and that video only points out the discoveries from the asteroid belt and not the kuiper belt (which is far, larger and has far more dormant comets and asteroids hanging out back there.)
Plus it's still difficult to wrap your head around because the vast majority of the number of findings have been within the last decade, dwarfing the discoveries during the 80s and 90s, when asteroid and small-body searching wasn't nearly as prominant as it is today.

It just proves that our solar backyard is still an interesting and active place to live around, IMHO.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925

Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
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#5
RE: 30 years, half a million asteroids.
I just want to know ...Who is going to clean up this mess??? sky-daddy???

Seriously though...the thought of resources is temptin....hmmmm
"The Universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest." G'Kar-B5
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#6
RE: 30 years, half a million asteroids.
One has only to look at the craters on the moon to see how good a job the alleged creator god did with setting everything in a proper orbit. The moon has been carpet bombed by errant asteroids that ole god fucked up on.
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#7
RE: 30 years, half a million asteroids.
(August 27, 2010 at 11:18 pm)Minimalist Wrote: One has only to look at the craters on the moon to see how good a job the alleged creator god did with setting everything in a proper orbit. The moon has been carpet bombed by errant asteroids that ole god fucked up on.

It was likely created by a massive impact on Earth as well. Asteroids scare me. Panic
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#8
RE: 30 years, half a million asteroids.
(August 27, 2010 at 11:18 pm)Minimalist Wrote: One has only to look at the craters on the moon to see how good a job the alleged creator god did with setting everything in a proper orbit. The moon has been carpet bombed by errant asteroids that ole god fucked up on.

and who knows how many jupiter has picked up in the years since the solar system's formation, as the Gas Giant is attributed by astronomers as being responsible for gravitationally attracting or pushing things out from going into the inner portion of the solar system and (along with mars) stabilizing the asteroid belt to a certain extent like how shepherd moons stabilize their rings.

(Speaking of which, the sun does have several rings - one of them is the asteroid belt.)

Still, despite several gas giants and the moon helping to filter out most asteroids and comets, we still get pummeled on a regular basis solidly enough to kill more than half of all species on earth.

Still, without asteroid impacts and a god reference, I'd have no objective measure in which to measure just how hard I would 'hit that' when referring to the ladies. Wink
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925

Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
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#9
RE: 30 years, half a million asteroids.
I read one hypothesis that said large mass planets don't shield us from small body object impacts, but instead attract more small bodies into our solar system.
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#10
RE: 30 years, half a million asteroids.
(August 28, 2010 at 1:48 am)lrh9 Wrote: I read one hypothesis that said large mass planets don't shield us from small body object impacts, but instead attract more small bodies into our solar system.

That depends on the body and the small objects. For example, it was a long pervading theory that the sun had a companion brown dwarf star called "Nemesis" that was so far out and only came as close as the Kuiper belt to periodically perturb the orbits of many of the comets and asteroids to shower the inside of the solar system with impacts, increasing the likelyhood of major impact for a certain and measurably predictable and repetative pattern of impact events.
The cause of this, however, has since been attributed with the solar system's oscillations as it travells in orbit around the galaxy that cause this and not a large body, but yes, that idea is certainly possible, but Jupiter and the Moon are attributed to actually reducing the frequency of impacts and not increasing it, to my understanding.

I'm sure this is a general idea and not necessarily a rule, because I'm certain there are exceptions when jupiter and the moon's gravitational influence may have pulled or pushed something in the wrong direction and made it more likely, but this happens less frequently.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925

Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
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