Posted on 07/26/2019 11:53:44 AM PDT by ransomnote
Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn’t figure out “why everyone was so alarmed.”
“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.”
This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. 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.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/it-snuck-up-us-city-killer-asteroid-just-missed-earth-scientists-almost-didnt-detect-it-time/?utm_term=.53842ff32177
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Any scientist worthy of the label should know well that the odds of an asteroid hitting a city are tiny. There’s not even a 1 in 3 chance one would hit solid land, and most of the land on Earth is uninhabited still.
The odds are so long that if an asteroid is claimed to have entirely hit a city I would suspect that something else had happened.
> How far out does the gravitational pull of the earth extend.
If you go by the theory, the range is infinite, though the level of force exerted drops via a square power curve.
To answer what I think you were getting at... it’s not realistically possible for the Earth to pull in an asteroid. If it wasn’t already on a collision course, the feeble pull of Earth gravity at interplanetary distances would not have a substantial short-term effect the trajectory of a rock flying through space at the speeds they move.
strategic leak by the deep (space) state
meh...they all look like they have hemorrhoids...
You are correct, but this asteroid was close enough to have its orbit modified by the Earth's, and maybe even the moon's gravity. Astronomers need to follow this one very closely, because if it didn't have an orbit that intersected us before, it might now.
Vote Democrat if you want an end to anthropomorphic comet change.
Whatever effect Earth’s gravity had on this object might be a concern for the next time this thing comes by.
In terms of distances as related in space that thing parted our hair...
I Get it.
It goes out to the end of the universe , the strength diminishes with the distance squared. A better question is how far out is the pull of the Earth equal to the pull of the sun.
By my calculations the pull of the Earth was 9 times that of the sun at the closest approach. So it was already being sucked in , just not all the way.
So your theory is that the pull of the earth gravitational field is not sufficient to capture an object as large as meteor of this size and hold in earth orbit or worse pull it into earth atmosphere?
Scientists could have a news conference tomorrow to tell us we're going to get blasted by an asteroid. Half the population wouldn't believe them and the other half would argue over how bad it's going to be.
As for the reaction, many would go on about their lives without a care in the world while others would join doomsday cults. Some would throw end of the world parties, others would partake in orgies of violence and mayhem.
I would expect many governments to not give any public notification at all if they knew something bad was headed our way and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
However, the smoke from the dinosaurs that perished in the Permian-Triassic big strike is still floating around the atmosphere! (Look at all those little dinosaur clouds crawling along the horizon! :0
(Almost bed time!)
Agreed, but nevertheless the impact even in the ocean or on uninhabited land would have been massive. It would have been equivalent to the explosion of a 10-50 megaton H-bomb. It would be the news story of the year.
Try 25 km sec, dense rock, one hundred meter diameter and select a range to impact. Enjoy?
https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/
lets do the math
passed within 45000 miles = a circular area (Pi R^2 = 1,590,384,375 sq miles) divided by a profile area of earth (15,705,369 sq mi) is about 1 chance in 101 to touch the earth (less if it wasn’t a perpendicular path)
‘City killer’ would also have to hit somewhere near a city (a rather small chance to be somewhere in that 15,705,369 sq mi potential disk area)
((187 to 427 feet ???? they don’t even have a decent number for its size ???)
oh and the leftards would blame Trump ....
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