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MRB_Doom

Asteroid flying by Earth has own moon

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"potential city killer."


Usual fear mongering, the odds of anything from space hitting a city are incredible low. Most of the Earths surface is ocean or barren land.

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Scet said:

Usual fear mongering, the odds of anything from space hitting a city are incredible low. Most of the Earths surface is ocean or barren land.

No they freely admit there's no chance of this hitting the earth. Any sensationalism is coming from the media.

The term "city killer" is used to describe a class of meteorites that is below the threshold of "planet killer" or mass extinction event asteroids, for which our cataloging is significantly behind in terms of completion. They are called this based on the Megatonnage of the explosion that would be generated on collision, being sufficient to wipe out a metropolitan area, much like an air blast nuclear weapon.

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It's my understanding that in the past few billion years, orbits have stabilized around the sun and most space debris has fallen together or escaped the system. The chance of anything large enough to destroy Earth being on a collision course is infinitesimal.

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Bucket said:

The chance of anything large enough to destroy Earth being on a collision course is inevitable.

Fixed.

EDIT: Define "destroy earth."

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The chance is inevitable? That's the most awkward-sounding phrase I've seen all day.

Anyway, the second part of your post is the relevant one. George Carlin applies here: the planet will be fine; we might be fucked, but the planet will be fine.

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Chances are that one day there WILL be an asteroid on a collision course to Earth. We are in a giant ass shooting gallery after all.

So we either build a defense system, or move, or both. Preferably both.

The asteroid should be a reminder if anything.

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Bucket said:

It's my understanding that in the past few billion years, orbits have stabilized around the sun and most space debris has fallen together or escaped the system. The chance of anything large enough to destroy Earth being on a collision course is infinitesimal.

...Said one dinosaur to his friend.

65 million years is not a long time ago for earth or our solar system. But as far as orbits stabilizing, I don't know what to say. The asteroid belt contains millions of chunks of rock that only require a proper shove from jupiter and a ricochet here or there to careen into the inner solar system.


And these are only the ones we can find so far. Seriously, it's a shooting gallery out there.

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Well that's interesting. An asteroid that has something following it. It really doesn't look like a moon from looking at the pictures, but we don't know for sure.

yukib1t said:

That's no moon. It's a space station.

That just might be the case.

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I believe that, unlike the definition of planet (the new one, at least), the definition of "moon" has no lower mass limit; rather, it's simply defined as an object gravitationally bound to a larger object in an orbit. If they were roughly the same size they'd only be called a binary asteroid system (which they can be called at any rate).

Feel free to correct me if you know better though.

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