A Hyper-Velocity Impact In the Asteroid Belt?

astroengine writes "Astronomers have spotted something rather odd in the asteroid belt. It looks like a comet, but it's got a circular orbit, similar to an asteroid. Whether it's an asteroid or a comet, it has a long, comet-like tail, suggesting something is being vented into space. Some experts think it could be a very rare comet/asteroid hybrid being heated by the sun, but there's an even more exciting possibility: It could be the first ever observation of two asteroids colliding in the asteroid belt."

How is that more exciting?

[Maltheus]

How is an asteroid collision more exciting than some kind of funky, very rare asteroid/comet hybrid?

We need an asteroid in the face, folks.

[FreakerSFX]

Seriously...not anything big but something Tunguska sized would do, especially over a moderately populated area.

We spend peanuts on detecting potential collisions that could be the cause of the next extinction event. Mark my words, there'll be more money spent on earthquake analysis for Haiti and other "sensational" causes than will be spent on detecting PHOs (potentially hazardous objects) in the next 10 years. I am not denigrating the need to spend money on Haiti - that's a tragedy for sure - but when you look at how reactive we are with public money (New Orleans, anyone? Despite warnings, no one saw this coming?) when a much smaller amount spent up-front would potentially save not just a lot more lives but a lot more money....if better building codes had been in force in Haiti - how many more people would have survived? How much money would have been saved?

I despair for our race. If we saw a dinosaur killer coming and had a program in place already we could probably survive it. Asteroids move slowly but are heavy and require a lot of time/energy to deflect so we would see them early and be able to react...comets move much, much faster but are lighter so presumably if we had the detection gear and a few mass drivers in space already, we could deal with it in a safe time frame.

So give us our Haiti or Katrina from space, please. Make it hurt but not too much - just enough to wake up the people handing out government cash.

Re:Who was driving?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick disclaimer: I am a female, and I'm not trying to be judgmental or give off a feminist frame of mind.
Observing sometimes as a pedestrian, I think women are far less likely to yeild than men. It's my theory that this is in part because in the back of a woman's brain there's this precedent set by manners--people hold doors open for women to go first all the time. Also, women are more social, so when they're driving, their minds are far more likely to be thinking about people, where they are going, when they will get home, all of that, and not so much thinking about actually driving.

Re:Who was driving?

[goose-incarnated]

Sadly I do (see my other post) ... funnily enough when I was single I looked at all those guys with more than one woman and thought "Man, I wish I had their problems"...

I now look at all those guys with no woman and think the very same thing

Re:A complete sentence?

[JoshuaZ]

Humans are good at context recognition. We can often gather information when data is missing or incomplete as much of human speech is effectively redundant. Thus, we can often complete a . In this case, the incomplete sentence made the headline shorter and made it very clear what was being communicated. The headline communicated that there may have been an asteroid collision but that scientists were very unsure. Headlines frequently use sentence fragments so we can quickly scan over them and see if we are interested. Newspapers have been doing this for some time. Indeed, many famous headlines are only one or two words.

Re:Priorities are a function of Probabilities

[FreakerSFX]

From an open letter to congress, here:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=9866 [spaceref.com]

"We cannot rely on statistics alone to protect us from catastrophe; such a strategy is like refusing to buy fire insurance because blazes are infrequent. Our country simply cannot afford to wait for the first modern occurrence of a devastating NEO impact before taking steps to adequately address this threat. We may not have the luxury of a second chance, for time is not necessarily on our side. If we do not act now, and we subsequently learn too late of an impending collision against which we cannot defend, it will not matter who should have moved to prevent the catastrophe . . . only that they failed to do so when they had the opportunity to prevent it. "

We do have the technology. We do have the money. We have a moral obligation to our species to protect it.

Re:Priorities are a function of Probabilities

[syousef]

Given the disparity in the probability of asteroid strikes (on populated areas, no less) vs earthquakes, it should be no surprise that the world governments believe money is better spent on earthquake prediction and evacuation relief, not on asteroid strike detection. The "bang for the buck" is clearly higher in earthquake spending.

1. An earthquake affects a relatively small population.

2. A single dinosaur killer could wipe out humanity.

3. Probability for all these events approaches 1 as time goes on.

In light of the above your "bang for buck" argument is silly. It's like counting the pennies while sitting on the railroad track with your back turned to a huge locomotive with blaring sirens that's about to hit you at 100km/hr and arguing that it costs too much to turn around and look at how close it is, never mind get off your ass and out of the way of the train.

Re:Probably not

[Katatsumuri]

The mods sometimes do mod a good joke "Informative" or "Insightful" to add more fun to it, in this case suggesting the classic Asteroids game physics were real. I'm not sure who is "Clueless" or "Humorless" in this case.