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A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

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Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#241
post #220
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the creativity! That said, the moon stabilized earth’s rotation angle, giving us the seasons, and it also drives huge chunks of life ecosystems and weather with the tides. So adding a second body in rotation to Earth with such superpowers would muck with a lot of stuff along the way. Maybe put it around Mars instead?

The diameter of this asteroid is estimated to be ~160 km, which is 21.7 times less than Moon with d=3474 km. Assuming similar density, the mass of the new asteroid is 10000 less than Moon and it's unlikely to affect much.

Ah, ok, good to know! When I read "dwarf planet", I automatically assumed it to be bigger than (or at least comparable in size to) the moon, which is a mere sattelite of a small planet. Then again, even Pluto, which was considered for a long time to be an "actual" planet, is smaller than the moon...

Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#242

I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.

Why not tow it into Venus or Mars orbit instead? They could do with the benefits of having a decent sized moon. It would make terraforming and long term habitation more straightforward and likely to succeed as well as providing lots of useful materials feedstock atop the gravity well.

Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#243
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come our culture didn’t base astronomical units around base 10 of our current units?

It's an old unit, so there wasn't a global standard yet, and it's exact value wasn't known for a long time, but it was still useful for ratios. E.g. if you observe the orbit time of another planet, you can tell its distance from the sun relative to the distance of Earth to Sun (1 astronomical unit) relatively accurately, even if you can't measure what it is in meters very well.

I have more trouble with parsec. I have a rough idea of how big our galaxy is in light years and some idea about nearby stars. Age of the universe helps anchor things in billions of light years. Then suddenly something is measured in parsecs. Probably a similar thing for the experts.

Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#244
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hoping we'll get lucky in my lifetime and something big like that will just hit Mars on it's own. It would be a hell of a world to go from "desert" to "so we've got all these new oceans to name and also you can't breathe it but ground level pressure is one atmosphere".

I think seeing something world changingly large randomly smashing into our next door neighbor would leave me feeling something other than lucky. But sure if it’s gonna happen, let’s get the neighbors a pool! Just let me uh… change my shorts.

I say, better to have it happen on Mars than on Earth! Such an event would probably even have the positive effect of raising awareness and increasing funding of programmes that monitor asteroids hazardous to earth and technologies to deflect them.

Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is an aspect of orbital mechanics that people find unintuitive before they study it. You can't be captured by a planet's gravity alone. If you come in from infinity (i.e., not already captured) you will escape to infinity (remain not captured). The basic idea can be seen from the fact that gravitational dynamics are time-reversible, so if gravity could capture you like this you could also start in orbit aro…

> gravitational dynamics are time-reversible, so if gravity could capture you like this you could also start in orbit around a planet and spontaneously be ejected. I don't have a strong background in physics, and perhaps this is splitting hairs, but is this true if we consider gravitational radiation? Over a very long time a body's orbital energy will be lost to gravitational waves.

Technically? Yes! Incoming gravitational radiation of precisely the correct shape will in fact un-decay a orbit under exactly the same (modulo appropiate symmetries) circumstances as a orbit would decay by emitting (the reverse of) that radiation. (The same applies to thermal radiation cooling things off - see Liouville's Theorem.)

For practical purposes, that'll never happen, but for practical purposes gravitation radiation doesn't matter anyway.

Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first hit when I search "planets capturing moons" says natural satellites generally are captured. "Most satellites of the outer solar system didn’t form with their host planets" https://astronomy.com/news/2016/12/captured-moons-of-the-gia... Even Triton, which is the size of a planet and in an almost circular orbit, is thought to be captured, the last I heard.

One of the criteria for planethood is an assumption that the body clears its own orbit. Moons don't just come hurtling out of the cosmos; they either result from a collision of some other body with the planet, as with our Moon, or they're already close to the planet's orbit at the time they are captured.

>One of the criteria for planethood is an assumption that the body clears its own orbit.

Is that so?

"The generic definition of a centaur is a small body that orbits the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune and crosses the orbits of one or more of the giant planets"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_(small_Solar_System_bo...

There are tens of thousands, so perhaps the definition of a planet is even more abstruse than people let on.

And apparently at least dozens have been identified as probably of interstellar origin, while it is thought that a centaur can become a moon, (e.g. Phoebe) so I wonder if we can really rule out that moons "come hurtling out of the cosmos":

"Being able to tell apart interstellar asteroids from native asteroids born in the Solar System has long eluded astronomers, but the team’s results identified 19 asteroids of interstellar origin. These are currently orbiting as part of the group of asteroids known as Centaurs, which roam the space in between the giant planets of the Solar System."

https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/interst...

Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#247
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hoping we'll get lucky in my lifetime and something big like that will just hit Mars on it's own. It would be a hell of a world to go from "desert" to "so we've got all these new oceans to name and also you can't breathe it but ground level pressure is one atmosphere".

I think seeing something world changingly large randomly smashing into our next door neighbor would leave me feeling something other than lucky. But sure if it’s gonna happen, let’s get the neighbors a pool! Just let me uh… change my shorts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker–Levy_9

An entire fragmented comet impacted Jupiter in 1994

> Over the next six days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km (7,500 mi) across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal).[24] Two impacts 12 hours apart on July 19 created impact marks of similar size to that caused by fragment G, and impacts continued until July 22, when fragment W struck the planet.[25]

Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#248

How is it possible to have an orbit without the sun at the center?

An elliptical orbit has, instead of a center, two foci, or focuses. In a very eccentric, or sharp and skinny, ellipse like this object's orbit, there is a focus very close to each pointy end. The sun is at one of these. (There is nothing at the other.) At the point of closest approach to the sun somewhere inside (the radius of) Saturn's orbit, it will be going twice as fast as Saturn, but at almost a right angle to it, swinging past the south pole of the sun, and will then shoot out to an immense distance, slowing all the way until it slows down enough to fall back in again for another go.

Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#249

I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.

How are you going to deal with the imbalance in charge? It's likely that the to-be-moon has a very large charge differential between it and the Sun, but also likely between us and it.

Re: A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

#250
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more referring to objects of this kind, not this specific object. Threats from supercomets are not a new concern: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/448/1/27/990672 "A 100 km comet striking the Earth would carry ∼1000 times the energy involved in the creation of the 150 km Chicxulub crater and would presumably remove the surface biosphere"

I think people have suggested the dinosaur killing asteroid may have caused global fires and rain of molten rock, so that scale might be sufficient as far as humans are concerned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ankmTU89X_A - simulation of impact. Note scale - both size and time. Note rebound that briefly created one of largest peaks in Earths history. And curtain of ejecta.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di... (note: popscience and old! let me know if any here got disproved or there is more up to date material)

Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

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