Latest Earth-Crossing Asteroid Passes by Tonight

jc42 writes "Astronomers have been looking at the first images of asteroid 2007 TU24, the 250-meter asteroid that will pass 540,000 km from the Earth at 8:33 UTC (3:30 EST) Tuesday morning. So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches. It might be sobering to consider that it was just discovered last October, and we know about maybe half of the objects like this in Earth-crossing orbits."

Re:What?

[eln]

But wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that the spiders would be more numerous the closer you get to the mechanism by which they're able to enter your house? In that case, assuming you don't actually know how they're getting into the house, you could draw no conclusion at all from looking at just one room.

No, your analogy is terrible. Since this is Slashdot, what we really need in order to properly visualize this is a bad car analogy, thusly:

Let's say you're walking down a standard neighborhood street, and you count 5 cars parked on the side of the road. With this information, you can easily extrapolate out that if there are 50 other streets in your neighborhood, there must be 250 cars in the neighborhood that you haven't yet seen. Cars that you see actually moving down the street are just chaotic side effects of the car phenomenon, and can safely be discarded from the analysis.

Or, perhaps a more accurate, but still poor, car analogy: If scientists have scanned half the sky at random, and have discovered around 5,000 cars hurtling toward Earth, they can reasonably state that there are probably around 10,000 cars hurtling toward Earth at any given moment. However, even if they're completely wrong, it's probably best to keep an eye out for falling cars.

And here I was hoping

[Associate]

I could get on with the raping and looting.