Right now the area surrounding planet Earth seems to be cluster bombed by asteroids and comets.

What gives?

I am as curious as the original poster of the vid, is this normal?

reply to post by XplanetX


Do you think this has anything to do with the unusual amount of 'shooting stars' or meteorites, whatever you want to call them?

Dont know bowt everybody else but the past week i have seen at least 10 a night and thats with only looking at the night sky for about an hour a night That cant be normal surely?

I had seen less than 5 in total throughout my entire life until last week

Originally posted by iksose7
reply to post by XplanetX

 

Do you think this has anything to do with the unusual amount of 'shooting stars' or meteorites, whatever you want to call them?

Dont know bowt everybody else but the past week i have seen at least 10 a night and thats with only looking at the night sky for about an hour a night

That cant be normal surely?

I had seen less than 5 in total throughout my entire life until last week

Apparently we had the perseid meteor shower event just recently, that may provide some explanation for what you have seen.
The clip that I have posted does concern me though.

What's with the video reading Nov 11th for every asteroid/comet? I know they aren't all at their closest on the same day..

I'm not really sure on how "normal" this is but none of these are even that close to the Earth. An AU is the distance form the Sun to the Earth, so even though .07 AU sounds close its really about 10,000,000 miles away from the Earth. That's about 100x Earth's diameter. When they start getting closer than .005 AU, then maybe we should start to get worried. lol I think I even saw one that said .8 AU, that's so unbelievable far away

Originally posted by Celestica
I'm not really sure on how "normal" this is but none of these are even that close to the Earth. An AU is the distance form the Sun to the Earth, so even though .07 AU sounds close its really about 10,000,000 miles away from the Earth. That's about 100x Earth's diameter. When they start getting closer than .005 AU, then maybe we should start to get worried. lol I think I even saw one that said .8 AU, that's so unbelievable far away

On a cosmic level it is actually quite close.

Does anybody know if a cluster like this has been seen near earth before or if this is normal?

Originally posted by XplanetX

Originally posted by Celestica
I'm not really sure on how "normal" this is but none of these are even that close to the Earth. An AU is the distance form the Sun to the Earth, so even though .07 AU sounds close its really about 10,000,000 miles away from the Earth. That's about 100x Earth's diameter. When they start getting closer than .005 AU, then maybe we should start to get worried. lol I think I even saw one that said .8 AU, that's so unbelievable far away

On a cosmic level it is actually quite close.

Does anybody know if a cluster like this has been seen near earth before or if this is normal?

On a cosmic level the Sun and the Earth are a split hair away from each other I'm fairly sure that in the 4 billion years Earth has been around we've had several instances of multiple comets in our vicinity, I mean we are right next to the asteroid belt after all.

reply to post by XplanetX


I'm pretty sure its fairly normal. I need to go back and catch a few other names, but the one I've checked so far (2002 AG29) has an orbital period of a little over a year. It's my guess that a lot of the other objects shown are going to have similar orbital periods.

reply to post by iksose7


If you're noticing an increase in meteors, it's probably something called a meteor shower. In this case, it would be the Perseids.


reply to post by XplanetX


We don't live on the cosmic scale. We live on the terrestrial scale. And, on the terrestrial scale, those distances are huge. As has been pointed out, on the cosmic scale, the sun is close enough to make anyone nervous. In fact, we better watch out for those quasars, they're right next door.

Well I looked up the orbital period for every object in the video. It looks like all of these are very short period comets or asteroids so it's safe to say that this is a common occurrence. Here is a list of all the objects, except for the ones most people already know like Elenin, Apophis, and YU55. The orbital period is in years.


2008 UX - .74
1992 JD - 1.05
1993 VD - .82
2000 WN10 - 1.00
2008 NA - .94
2004 VB61 - 3.49
2005 XB1 - 1.20
2011 FZ2 - 4.37
2011 LC19 - 5.75
2008 CJ - 3.61
1990 UA - 2.10
2000 OJ8 - 3.63
2002 AG29 - 1.13
2009 DO111 - 1.08
1991 TF3 - 3.34
2011 KF4 - 4.20
2000 SP43 - .73
2011 LJ19 - 4.24
2003 FH - 1.64
2009 HV2 - 2.10
2010 LM68 - 1.09

if you watch the video it says 11/11/11 which is when elenin is passing us. and you can see the name elenin with the other moving objects. this is not happing now, but in the future.

reply to post by Xcalibur254


It's also a select sampling at a fairly large zoom to make it look as if all these objects are just clustered around Earth with the other planets all alone.

Surely the video creator never says that there aren't a bunch more objects scattered all throughout the inner solar system, but to the uninformed it would be simple for them to not realize this and therefore likely the point of the video in the first place.

reply to post by XplanetX

What gives?

I am as curious as the original poster of the vid, is this normal?

Keep in mind that space is three dimensional which this video is not. Also the scale is way off, Earth is not that close to Mercury and Venus.

Most people get confused about these so called alignments and how close things are. If you were to use a true scale image showing the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars all in the same frame the planets would be so small that they would be hard to find let alone these very small comets and asteroids.

Here is a good example of an image with the scale way off just to show the number of objects.
www.nasa.gov...
In reality if we were to look at the Earth in that scale none of those satellites would be visible as they are far too small.

From the YouTube poster's comments.

Also,Earth is supposed to enter Elenin's tail on 11/2/11 ?

Earth does not enter Elenin's tail. Here is another complete misunderstanding of distance and alignments. Even if Elenin's tail were long enough (+35 million miles) it never transits the Sun so the tail will be pointing away from the Earth the entire time.

I noticed that in the last few years there has been more and more reports of near earth asteroids.
I do understand that our technology is getting better at detecting them, but does it not concern anyone that the numbers seems to be increasing rapidly?

Imagine what we have not detected out there yet that could be zooming by our planet.

I was checking out the RSOE feed and noticed there does seem to be a cluster of asteroids.
So I went to the NASA NEO site and looked:


(2008 SR7) 2011-Aug-05
(2011 OB26) 2011-Aug-06
(2011 OF26) 2011-Aug-07
(2008 NX) 2011-Aug-07
(2011 GD60) 2011-Aug-11
(2011 PK10) 2011-Aug-13
(2011 OE16) 2011-Aug-13
(2011 OW4) 2011-Aug-14
(2006 SE6) 2011-Aug-14
45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova 2011-Aug-15
(2011 ON24) 2011-Aug-16
(1988 TA) 2011-Aug-16
(2011 OE) 2011-Aug-16
(2011 OJ45) 2011-Aug-17
(2011 PF2) 2011-Aug-17
(1996 PC1) 2011-Aug-17
(2011 OJ5) 2011-Aug-18
(2011 BL45) 2011-Aug-19
(2008 RG1) 2011-Aug-20
(2011 PO1) 2011-Aug-21
(2011 OC18) 2011-Aug-21
(2009 AV) 2011-Aug-22
(2011 KP17) 2011-Aug-23
(2011 OY17) 2011-Aug-24
(2000 CP101) 2011-Aug-24
(2011 OM5) 2011-Aug-25
(2011 JP29) 2011-Aug-26
(2007 UT3) 2011-Aug-26
(2010 JW34) 2011-Aug-28
(2002 JR100) 2011-Aug-28
(2009 OO9) 2011-Aug-28
(2011 OR15) 2011-Aug-30

neo.jpl.nasa.gov...

Those are all of the NEO's I could find for August. That does seem to be a lot. How close they are to earth does not concern me as much as the numbers do. The numbers seem high for september and october too. But now here is my problem, I have not been watching the NEO numbers for some time, but it seems to me that last time I checked, (a couple of years ago), there was not nearly as many NEO's listed at one time.

Is it just me? Or are the numbers really increasing?
I remember watching a tv show a while back on the Tunguska Event in 1908, and they figured those happened about once every 2000 or so years.

But then after reading a bit more from wiki I found this:
Near Earth Objects

1908 Tunguska eventMain article: Tunguska event
It is now commonly believed that on 30 June 1908 a stony asteroid exploded over Tunguska with the energy of the explosion of 10 megatons of TNT. The explosion occurred at a height of 8.5 kilometers. The object that caused the explosion has been estimated to have had a diameter of 45–70 meters
1979 Vela IncidentMain article: Vela Incident

A 22 September 1979 event recorded as occurring near the junction of the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean was possibly a low-yield nuclear test, but was also initially thought to have been caused by the possible impact of an extraterrestrial object. The event, which became known as the Vela Incident, was identified by a U.S. Vela defence satellite in Earth orbit. The event alarm triggered multi-year investigations by several organizations which could not conclusively determine if the explosion was of nuclear or non-nuclear origin

2002 Eastern Mediterranean eventMain article:
Eastern Mediterranean event

On 6 June 2002 an object with an estimated diameter of 10 meters collided with Earth. The collision occurred over the Mediterranean Sea, between Greece and Libya, at approximately 34°N 21°E and the object exploded in mid-air. The energy released was estimated (from infrasound measurements) to be equivalent to 26 kilotons of TNT, comparable to a small nuclear weapon.[32]

2008 Sudan eventMain article: 2008 TC3

On 6 October 2008, scientists calculated that a small near-Earth asteroid, 2008 TC3, just sighted that night, should impact the Earth on 7 October over Sudan, at 0246 UTC, 5:46 local time.[33][34] The asteroid arrived as predicted. This is the first time that an asteroid impact on Earth has been accurately predicted. However, no reports of the actual impact have so far been published since it occurred in a very sparsely populated area. A systematic search for fragments found a total of 600 fragments, with a mass of 10.5 kilograms. The object is confirmed to have entered Earth's atmosphere as a meteor above northern Sudan at a velocity of 12.8 kilometers per second (29,000 mph).

2009 Indonesia event:
A large fireball was observed in the skies near Bone, Indonesia on October 8, 2009. This was thought to be caused by an asteroid approximately 10 meters in diameter. The fireball contained an estimated energy of 50 kilotons of TNT, or about twice the Nagasaki atomic bomb. No injuries were reported.

Seems to be an increase in larger (although still small) meteor strikes.

So is it just me? Or does there seem to be more space rock floating in our dirrection than usual?

I suspect, and always have ever since I was a teenager, that there is clusters of asteroids that seem to cross our path on a cycle of 100 or so years. And not every time, but occasionally when we go through this cluster, we get hit. Sometimes it is a Tunguska, sometimes nothing happens,and sometimes it is a KT event that wipes out almost everything.

That is just a theory/hunch though,based on what I understand the solar system to be and how things revolve in cycles and repeatable patterns.

Also when I was thinking about my post above I realized, the asteroids do not even need to be clustered together, just a cosmic chance that they happen to orbit into a cluster like pattern every so often. So you could have lots of asteroids coming in from different directions, but once every so many years (100's to 1000's) they could all seem to cluster into crossing orbits.

I don't know if I am making clear by typing what I am seeing in my head.

I see it like an atom, with electrons and nutrons circling it at different speeds, and every once and a while they all seem to meet in the same general space just through timing creating a cluster that only lasts for a short while and only happens every so often.

It's hard to explain.

Just a kind of random thought I had I guess.

reply to post by Darkblade71


I think the idea here is that this is the way it has been with minor fluctuations to one side or the other. We just have much better equipment (and continually getting better as we're still a good ways away from the technological singularity) and have been able to observe and track more things out there. The numbers will continue to grow, that's just the way it works. It's all been here for billions of years and we've only been able to find most of them for an exceedingly short amount of time.

So saying more or less than usual, is a fairly limited and relative term. I would say compared to the Late Heavy Bombardment, the current 'clutter' is not even a footnote, nor anything to be overly concerned about.

As I said in my previous post, this isn't even all that's out there, that's just a good size of the amount of stuff we know of that's within X distance from Earth. If they included everything that we know of currently in the inner solar system, it would paint a different picture.

Also, none of that even speaks to the horrible scale of the graphic combined with no scale for size can make even a little outhouse in orbit of the moon look to be a deadly threat to Earth. If Venus were at the point of its orbit that was closest to Earth, that graphic would make it look like a threat to us too.

reply to post by Darkblade71

So is it just me? Or does there seem to be more space rock floating in our dirrection than usual?

Think about how fast our knowledge of nature has been increasing over time. It was about 200 years ago when modern academia, of that time, was convinced that rocks did not fall from the heavens even though many people reported seeing such events and sometimes even found the respective meteorites. I mean, really! God does not through rocks at the Earth, right?

More recently it was thought that objects colliding with planets was very rare and nothing to really worry about until Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994.

In the last ten years we have been spending a lot of money and time watching for falling rocks and other NEO's and it has been paying off well. There is a lot of stuff floating around out there in space and there always has been. What has changed is our understanding of, and interests in, such things not the number of objects. With the increase of orbital and ground based telescopes, technology and interests from people all over the world we should expect the number of objects found to also increase. Keep up the interest as we are surely to learn more.

It definitely seems like a lot. I also agree with others though... the more technology we have, and the more interest we have in space - the more things we find. Kind of like when you buy a new car you rarely see, and all of a sudden you see the same car everywhere?
I guess it's kind of hard to tell unless we actually do some long research to show the amount of NEOs on each day over the last 5-10 years or so... and see if the number is increasing or not. I'm sure that research is done and out there...as it seems environmentalists of all types like to record everything (Thankfully)... it's just a matter of finding it.

The Perseid Meteor Shower happens every year at the same time. Nothing too unusual about that surely? Probably just a collective of space rubble that may or may not enter the atmosphere I saw some last week while sitting down by the beach with some friends and a few beers. EPIC.