9,000 Near Earth Objects Found and a Mystery
The vast majority of NEOs originate in the doughnut-shaped main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The orbit of a main-belt asteroid slowly changes as it is pushed by the uneven release of excess solar heat from the asteroid’s surface. The asteroid’s orbit eventually interacts with the orbital motions of Jupiter and Saturn changing the trajectory to bring the asteroid close to the Earth. An asteroid is classified as an NEO when its smallest distance from the Sun during an orbit is less than 1.3 times the average Earth-Sun distance.
The actual mechanism causing asteroids to disrupt is still unknown but some obvious scenarios such as tidal forces caused by the Sun and direct sublimation of silicates have been ruled out. One of the remaining scenarios is that volatiles inside the asteroid sublimate at moderate temperatures and create enough pressure to blow up the body. A similar process on a smaller scale called spalling can also break up surface rocks.
Credit: Lauri Voutilainen
But they noticed that their model had a problem – it predicted that there should be almost 10 times more objects on orbits that approach the Sun to within 10 solar diameters. The team then spent a year verifying their calculations before they came to the conclusion that the problem was not in their analysis but in their assumptions of how the Solar System works.
Prediscovery image of asteroid 1999 AN10 taken from the Palomar Digital Sky Survey. The faint streak is the trail left by the asteroid. The image has been contrast-enhanced.
Positions of all numbered asteroids and all numbered comets on 2009 January 1. The orbits and positions of the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter are also shown. Asteroids are yellow dots and comets are symbolized by sunward-pointing wedges
According to Granvik, their discovery of the catastrophic loss of asteroids before a collision with the Sun allows planetary scientists to understand a variety of recent observations from a new perspective but also leads to a more profound advance in asteroid science:
“Perhaps the most intriguing outcome of this study is that it is now possible to test models of asteroid interiors simply by keeping track of their orbits and sizes. This is truly remarkable and was completely unexpected when we first started constructing the new NEO model.”
The project achieved its aim of developing a new near-Earth-object population model that can be used for scientific and technical purposes.
Contacts and sources:
Minna Meriläinen-Tenhu, University of Helsinki
Dr. Mikael Granvik, Finland
Dr. Alessandro Morbidelli, France
Dr. Patrick Michel, France
Dr. Robert Jedicke,
Dr. Ed Beshore U.S.A.
Prof. David Vokrouhlický, Czech Republic
Citation: Mikael Granvik, Alessandro Morbidelli, Robert Jedicke, Bryce Bolin, William F. Bottke, Edward Beshore, David Vokrouhlický, Marco Delbò, and Patrick Michel (2016). Super-catastrophic disruption of asteroids at small perihelion distances. Nature 530.
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