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...well not until 2032 anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jan/30/asteroid-spotted-chance-colliding-with-earth-2032
Still don't underplay 1.3% chance - can easily become higher. Rated 3 on the Torino scale - so significant interest.
Its gonna happen one day
1.3% can start to seem like a big number in the context of annihilation.:-)
Well, if it puts an end to the STW politics threads it's probably for the best
The lottery is won regularly and the odds of winning that are massive compared to 1.3%!!
[insert shocked face emoji!]
1.3% can start to seem like a big number in the context of annihilation.:-)
hate to be the party pooper, but this asteroid isn’t big enough to annihilate the human race.
I think I'd have appreciated more warning in the thread title to make me not bother to read, something along the lines of *WARNING ANXIETY TRIGGERING* or even just something more obvious than 'don't look up'.
hate to be the party pooper, but this asteroid isn’t big enough to annihilate the human race.
Just America then? Please.
But will there be anything left to annihilate? I gather that The Doomsday Clock has recently ticked closer to midnight than ever before.
Maybe it heard that the Gulf of Mexico got renamed and was sad because it's friend created it.
We visited the Space Guard Centre on the Welsh border a few years ago - I highly recommend it if you have even the slightest interest in space stuff, but definitely book! - so I know smart people are on the case. 🙂
1.3% is bloody close. Right folks, coke and hookers for the next few years ?
Why change the habit of a lifetime?
Even if it misses by a few thousand miles won't the gravitational pull cause massive flooding.
Be exciting if it hit the moon, be like pocket billiards on a intergalactic scal
I think I’d have appreciated more warning in the thread title to make me not bother to read, something along the lines of *WARNING ANXIETY TRIGGERING* or even just something more obvious than ‘don’t look up’.
You probably shouldn't watch the film then.....
Even if it misses by a few thousand miles won’t the gravitational pull cause massive flooding.
At 100m wide, much less effect than Box Hill in Surrey has on flooding in New Zealand.
Box Hill is static.
hate to be the party pooper, but this asteroid isn’t big enough to annihilate the human race.
I was more looking at it from a personal annihilation perspective, it's plenty big enough to give me a little more than mild concussion 🙂
Seven years, got shit to do starting this year anyway. Fun fun fun.
Box Hill is static
It merely illustrates what a trivial gravitational effect such a tiny lump of rock would have.
Well, if it puts an end to the STW politics threads it’s probably for the best
Finally a big hitter worthy of the name
Wouldn’t be great if it fell on your house (or even anywhere close) but you’d have plenty of warning to get out of the way anyway.
it’s plenty big enough to give me a little more than mild concussion
Have we just settled the helmet debate?
Wouldn’t be great if it fell on your house (or even anywhere close) but you’d have plenty of warning to get out of the way anyway.
I wonder how accurately - should it be definelty to be deemed to be on a collision course - you could predict where it would impact in the closing days /weeks. Given that your trying to calculate the speed and direction of an object that is headed more or less straight towards you* from a vantage point on a spinning object that itself is going round in a massive circle at 67,000 miles an hour.
Imagine throwing a dart at a spin bowlers cricket ball and trying to calculate where the dart would hit the ball using only observations you're able to make from a view point on the ball itself
* as I understand it the whole challenge of identifying objects on a collision course with earth is that objects heading straight towards you are the hardest ones to notice
We got hit by something like that in 1908. Took out a supposedly uninhabited forest in Siberia, although I expect there were some unfortunates under it. Ocean or inhabited area and we have a big problem.
Oh well - chance to play snooker with if not planets, celestial objects.
Wouldn’t be great if it fell on your house (or even anywhere close) but you’d have plenty of warning to get out of the way anyway.
Can you imagine the gridlock when they announce an evacuation zone? Cyclists should be fine though! Meanwhile presumably some would be complaining their phone was screetching alerts and it was probably a false alarm!
What bike for armageddon? I'm assuming it'll need to be non-electric.
I wonder how accurately – should it be definelty to be deemed to be on a collision course – you could predict where it would impact in the closing days /weeks. Given that your trying to calculate the speed and direction of an object that is headed more or less straight towards you* from a vantage point on a spinning object that itself is going round in a massive circle at 67,000 miles an hour.
Imagine throwing a dart at a spin bowlers cricket ball and trying to calculate where the dart would hit the ball using only observations you’re able to make from a view point on the ball itself
Please tell me that you work for NASA.
Can you imagine the gridlock when they announce an evacuation zone? Cyclists should be fine though! Meanwhile presumably some would be complaining their phone was screetching alerts and it was probably a false alarm!.
Nobody's bike will be charged or ready to go, and everybody will be so obese that they won't be able to pedal unassisted. And people complaining about alerts on their phones would be quite right - how much warning do you need? It's already being talked about 7 years ahead!
😀
Isn't there a space force for just this kind of thing? MAGA, all is forgiven..
We will be fine. Just going to paint bits of earth high vis yellow and put some led lights on.
as I understand it the whole challenge of identifying objects on a collision course with earth is that objects heading straight towards you are the hardest ones to notice
It's not heading straight towards us, it's heading towards where we will be in 2032. It'll be in an elliptical orbit, not sure if it's bigger than ours or smaller, so it will be moving across the sky and even as it approaches in the final few days it will still be at an angle, like a car joining a motorway without looking and crashing into someone already on it.
hate to be the party pooper, but this asteroid isn’t big enough to annihilate the human race.
No, but it would do a great job of urban renewal of the area around the White House.
We got hit by something like that in 1908. Took out a supposedly uninhabited forest in Siberia, although I expect there were some unfortunates under it. Ocean or inhabited area and we have a big problem.
No, we didn’t. There’s no crater, for starters, it was almost certainly a comet core coming in at an oblique angle and exploding above the surface, same effect as an airburst nuclear explosion. It flattened square miles of taiga forest, which is how we know it was an airburst explosion, because the flattened trees radiate outwards from the centre of the explosion. Photos taken afterwards clearly show this.
A solid object hitting the ground would leave a crater, like the one in Arizona, or the radiating damage to the crust like the Chixulub crater on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, that one was big enough to cause a global extinction.
It would have looked a bit like this:
for comparison…
like the Chixulub crater on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, that one was big enough to cause a global extinction.
Don’t be silly now. That was 100+ the diameter of the one just spotted and a million or more times the mass.
Back to reality: Yes a city like Washington could be substantially destroyed with a direct hit. But as 1% or less of the world is urbanised, the most likely scenario is it hits the middle of the Pacific. And if it did strike land it hits somewhere nowheresville, like northern Siberia.
Lol, when you google Chixulub you get a meteorite zooming across the screen and then the screen shakes on impact!
Don’t be silly now. That was 100+ the diameter of the one just spotted and a million or more times the mass.
Yes, I’m fully aware of that, oddly enough. My point still stands, the 1908 object didn’t hit us, so no crater. But significant urban renewal as a result. Not unlike LA, but bigger.
even as it approaches in the final few days it will still be at an angle,
At that point it would appear to be coming straight towards the earth but for the spin of the latter. Relative to sun and stars it would be the same place in the sky, just getting bigger and bigger…
Coincidentally, the mathematics underpinning much of my work was developed for estimating the trajectory of spacecraft based on limited and imprecise observations.
Coincidentally, the mathematics underpinning much of my work was developed for estimating the trajectory of spacecraft based on limited and imprecise observations
Katherine Johnstone?
Not quite, Rudolph Kalman. One is the analytical geometry of designing trajectories, the other is the estimation of what’s actually happening in real time. His technique is used in a huge range of fields including weather forecasting.
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Was a one percent chance, not 2.3 percent ! Run for the hills.
Was a one percent chance, now 2.3 percent ! Run for the hills.