As of today, there are currently 1453 known potentially hazardous asteroids that could impact Earth and cause a real planetary catastrophe. Given the new diverse “snow globe” model of our solar system in relation to asteroids, how may more don’t we know about? It only takes one. Of more pragmatic interest, this new paper suggests a diverse asteroid population stirred up in the ‘snow globe’ model was essential to bringing water to Earth.
From the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Cambridge, MA –
Our solar system seems like a neat and orderly place, with small, rocky worlds near the Sun and big, gaseous worlds farther out, all eight planets following orbital paths unchanged since they formed.
However, the true history of the solar system is more riotous. Giant planets migrated in and out, tossing interplanetary flotsam and jetsam far and wide. New clues to this tumultuous past come from the asteroid belt.
“We found that the giant planets shook up the asteroids like flakes in a snow globe,” says lead author Francesca DeMeo, a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Millions of asteroids circle the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, in a region known as the main asteroid belt. Traditionally, they were viewed as the pieces of a failed planet that was prevented from forming by the influence of Jupiter’s powerful gravity. Their compositions seemed to vary methodically from drier to wetter, due to the drop in temperature as you move away from the Sun.
That traditional view changed as astronomers recognized that the current residents of the main asteroid belt weren’t all there from the start. In the early history of our solar system the giant planets ran amok, migrating inward and outward substantially. Jupiter may have moved as close to the Sun as Mars is now. In the process, it swept the asteroid belt nearly clean, leaving only a tenth of one percent of its original population.
As the planets migrated, they stirred the contents of the solar system. Objects from as close to the Sun as Mercury, and as far out as Neptune, all collected in the main asteroid belt.
“The asteroid belt is a melting pot of objects arriving from diverse locations and backgrounds,” explains DeMeo.
Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, DeMeo and co-author Benoit Carry (Paris Observatory) examined the compositions of thousands of asteroids within the main belt. They found that the asteroid belt is more diverse than previously realized, especially when you look at the smaller asteroids.
This finding has interesting implications for the history of Earth. Astronomers have theorized that long-ago asteroid impacts delivered much of the water now filling Earth’s oceans. If true, the stirring provided by migrating planets may have been essential to bringing those asteroids.
This raises the question of whether an Earth-like exoplanet would also require a rain of asteroids to bring water and make it habitable. If so, then Earth-like worlds might be rarer than we thought.
The paper describing these findings appears in the January 30, 2014 issue of Nature.
Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.
Bennett In Vermont says:
January 30, 2014 at 7:52 pm
Gail Combs says: at 4:49 pm “Predators are generally smarter than prey….”
But what if what we call humanity is only a 4 on a predatory scale of 10?
There may be Kzin out there with a Payton Manning as QB.. How’s that for mixing cultural reference?
Bennett,
The Kzinamaratsoff brothers….. with +200 IQs?!
“Nice kitty….”
Mac
Lettuce assume evolutionary theory – or at least parts of it – are correct.
What then is the most successful predator?
We have the cave bear (omnivore, big, heavily furred against the winter, long claws, big teeth (for when omniviving is not the only thing for supper!) , long arms and heavy shoulders, good nose, possibly modest long-distance eyesight, good reflexes, high speed in sprints….
Dire wolf.
Sabre-tooth tiger.
North American lion.
Hyena?
Coyote?
Mammoth and mastodon? Not really predators, but don’t get caught in a stampede.
etc.
Against those eminent predators, we have a baby infant girl.
Pink, naked, no teeth, noisy and smelly, but can’t smell prey nor predators good. Can’t eat meat, not too good at plants, competes with the bear for what easy soft food is between 2 inches and 12 inches off of the ground. Can’t talk and won’t listen. Can’t fight. Can’t even do much biting. No claws. Modest eyesight, might be near or far-sighted in fact. Can’t run, walk or crawl. No throwing, kicking, nor even stamping-of-the-feet as weapons.
Now Janice, pamela, and Gail: Which of these is supreme predator based on the last 12,000 years of history? The sabre-tooth tiger, the lion or panther or the dire wolf or cave bear? Or the little bitty infant? (Or is the supreme predator across the globe and through history and biology, not the infant naked girl, but her mother and father?)
J Martin says:
January 31, 2014 at 12:10 pm
“Earth’s oceans is about 1.3 trillion cubic km” That’s a lot of 1 to 4 cubic kilometre asteroids of water. The idea that the oceans were brought to Earth after it formed by some sort of bombardment seems hardly credible.
That the water comes from the rocks that formed planet Earth seems more likely, and perhaps this suggests how some of that water came to be in the first place.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/water-is-a-by-product-of-particle-space-weathering-by-the-solar-wind/
It’s interesting theory.
But generally it’s thought the 1.3 trillion cubic km of water Earth’s ocean came mostly from Earth via volcanic activity and large amount coming via impactors.
Or since Earth formed from impactors all of Earth water came formation of Earth and subsequent
accumulation of impactors [so that would include the Mars size body that hit proto-earth, which formed the Earth and the Moon about 4.5 billion years ago [according Giant impact hypothesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis ].
It’s considered that receive usually high rate impactor up until about 3.8 billion years ago.
Or Mars size impactor occurred during a period which all inner planet were forming into the planets they are today. Or different way to say this is that it took up 3.8 billion years ago for inner planet to remove most bodies in their region. Whereas it’s consider in region of our gas gaint, these bodies clear there around them in shorter period of time. Or it’s thought jupiter fromed most of mass within about 100 million years since the interstellar gas will form the Sun stared to collapse and our Sun mass grew and created the gravity well which currently dominates our solar system..
If our gas giants took longer than 100 million year, it’s unlikely they took as much 1 billion years.
In comparison our system beyond Pluto/Neptune [beyond all the known gas giants] has not gone thru this “clearing out of the region”. Or beyond gas giants, most of matter does not lie along Solar equator or disc, so it’s more spherical than disk shaped.
So beyond the gas giants- so Kuiper belt and beyond to Oort Cloud, bodies more like they were before before came together forming planets.
Or:
“The Kuiper Belt extends from about 30 to 55 AU and is probably populated with hundreds of thousands of icy bodies larger than 100 km (62 miles) across and an estimated trillion or more comets.”
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=KBOs&Display=OverviewLong
Of course far more than hundreds thousand of icy bodies less 100 km or or say less 10 km in diameter.
And also from above link::
“The object (2003VB12), since named Sedna for an Inuit goddess who lives at the bottom of the frigid Arctic ocean, approaches the sun only briefly during its 10,500-year solar orbit. It never enters the Kuiper Belt, whose outer boundary region lies at about 55 AU — instead, Sedna travels in a long, elliptical orbit between 76 and nearly 1,000 AU from the sun. Since Sedna’s orbit takes it to such an extreme distance, its discoverers have suggested that it is the first observed body belonging to the inner Oort Cloud.”
And though haven’t seen them yet there is a lot other objects in the Oort Clouds
So Earth has very high density, and earth core has very little water in it. So basically if there 1% content of things which formed Earth, Earth’s core water has moved upward to surface.
Or Earth mass is 5.97 x 10^24
It’s water is 1.4 x 10^21 kg.
Or took 1/2 mass of earth which had average of 1% water, and reduced this percent to 1/2%
then water removed is far more than mass of our oceans.
so some large percentage of water is out gases from volcanoes [as current volcanoes do]
and maybe 10-20% or came from later accumulation of impacting bodies- whether as big as 50 km in diameter or “dust” size.
RACookPE1978 says:
January 31, 2014 at 9:12 pm
…..Or is the supreme predator across the globe and through history and biology, not the infant naked girl, but her mother and father?
RACookPE1978,
On this planet, mankind is the climax predator. We did not ‘claw’ our way to the top…no. Through thousands of generations of smart hominids surviving and their less smart and less genetically ‘lucky’ siblings getting killed off, we evolved, learned to make increasingly complex tools, and thought/fought our way to the top.
Now, we take our first toddling steps off the doorstep of the home planet. We will not continue to evolve, to ‘retain the title’, without continual challenges that exceed our abilities… and force us to learn or die. Our horizon is the orbit of Mars and beyond lie the asteroids, gas giants, on out to the Oort Cloud…..
Shall we set sail on those seas? Surely, ‘there be dragons’.
There are always ‘dragons’, yet still we must go. It’s what we do.
Mac
The article’s theory has a Jupiter sized hole in it, alright.
Exactly what could give Jupiter an orbit near Mars’ current elliptical orbital _without eating Mars_? Hell, all the inner planets!
And exactly what would circularize Jupiter to the current elliptical orbit _without destroying/destabilizing Mars_?
By my count that looks like not one, but two, very improbable events.
@ur momisugly Dr. T. Telenko
Yes!
Alan Robertson says:
“I’m glad that you took it easy on Carbomontanus. At first, I thought he was noisy for being all over the place and now, I think he may only be a Jesuit.”
I have a close friend who is a Jesuit. When I met him (he was in civilian clothes) and he somewhere in the conversation indicated he was a Jesuit, I exclaimed, “Oh, a heretic!” and he laughed at length. I knew I had a new friend. I shall forward your comment to him.
@ur momisugly Jim G and A Robertson
So you take me for a Jesuit. What a compliment but nothing could be farther from it. You are obviously poor on geography.
The Jesuits have been forbidden in the Danish-Norwegiann empire ever since Lutheri reformation, and forbidden again by our fameous constitution of 1814 to be commemorated in 2014. The ban was first lifted in 1956 when some hungarian Jesuits had to be taken care of as refugees.
What I have in positive memory from them is that they secured the Imperial Chineese astronomical observatory cronicles for mankind. But they were accused from European side for having became heretics, having learnt Chineese, and having dressed up in Mandarine costumes and for not having carried out their mission.
Even more important for us perhaps is the story of Athanasius Kircher, a very fameous bluff maker and spindoctor in most luxurious Vatican editions, against not only Gallilei but also Christiaan Huyghens` discovery of Titan and right understanding of the physical nature of Saturns rings. plus fraud of having cracked the code of the hieroglyphs, and sheere phantacy and fraud of acoustics and geophysics.
Because of their very fameous sins, they were banned and forbidden about 1770, their order dissolved by the Pope.
Which cannot be true, because in 1786 (?) at the Venus passage, The University of Copenhagen needed trained astronomers to go to Vardø to the midnight sun, as Captain Cook went to Tahiti on the other side of the globe to see it from there, on behalf of the British Empire.
The university of Copenhagen may have asked at the Imperial Charles IV university of Praha at the imperial observatory there, because that is where Tyco Brahe went in order to teach them behaviours and astronomy. But in the meantime the imperial observatory had been mooved to Wien.
Wien then only had….. 2 Jesuits…. to send. a certain Maximillianus Hell and his Hungarian Jesuit comrade. Both will be found on Wikipedia.
The King was in charge so he could make DISPENSATIONE for just 2 Jesuits.
They came to Copenhagen by horse, and went by sailboat to Christiania and there by Horse further to Nidaros, to Bishop Gunnerus of Nidaros , who surely examined their beliefs, and confirmed them thorroughly on what to do and what not to do in the Nidaros Bishop see Area.
Because if you do that up there, the Natives are known to throw you to sea!
Bishop Gunnerus, a quite strong bishop, had founded the Royal Norwegian society of sciences some years earlier.
The 2 poor Jesuits went by sailboat further up the coast with a lot of seasickness and landed in Vardø to hibernate there for the winter, and set up their observatory on the castle.
They were kind enough to bring with them some bottles of wine and rasins and some chocolate and tea. The rest could then be served from the side of Vardø very fine. Wild grouse, reindeer, codfish, Rubus chamæmorus and arcticus,..and crabs and mussles of best sort. Even vegetables such as , Angelicum archangelicum, Cocleare officinalis, and Allium oleraceum.
The hungarian companian is the one who discovered the finnish- hungarian languages, being able to talk with the finns and the lapps in the Varanger Fjord.
Hell & al having both TELESCOPIVM and HOROLOGIVM OSCILLATORIVM in their OBSERVATORIVM were lucky to get observations of the in an out of Venus quite exactly on the clock and by telescope even with clouds in between.
On the midnight sun in Vardø.
Which is needed rather precisely for calculating 1AU together with Captain Cook on Tahiti. The size of the earth then enables possible trigonometry. Exact orbit proportions being given then by Keppler and Newtonian law.
Hell & al. came from it with very good notes,
They were said to be good guys and they had “not been trying to missionize”., which was strictly forbidden for them. (But can it be done any better?)
Datum Sign! by the Vardø Fort Colonel Commander, to the King.
Conclusion:
That dissolvement of the Jesuit order must be taken with a grain of salt CVM GRANVM SALIS……
They may have been installed behind thick Urban Walls of the URBI & ORBI type, and with bars to atone for their very fameous sins, and to meditate.. And then let out for atonement in the free…. in “Civil service”…. at the Imperial Observatory in Wien for instance .
Thus they came even to Gunnerus in Nidaros and to Vardø. And what has possibly enabled a Moravian and a Hungarian and those people up there north of Copenhagen to talk with each other in any efficient way all the way must have been the Spiritus Sanctus with them all.
This is not my “table” or faculty or department.
But I know that by submitting to such an order, you lie down flat with your nose down and bottoms up and arms out and promise for eternity, and promise to God, not even to the Pope.
So if the Pope happens to be sober for a while, he will understand that he is not in charge to lift or to break any such promise for people.
Hopefully he has understood that at least.
The pope officially re- founded the jesuit order in 1814, and since then it seems that they could behave.
Carbomontanus,
What this article says about this new observational asteroid census data is best summed up in these two sentence fragments:
1) “…rogue asteroids are actually more common than previously thought.”
and
2) “…everything’s been moved around a lot and the solar system has been very dynamic.”
Everything else appears to be pure guess work without sound scientific analysis and testing of theoretical models against this observed asteroid census data.
To mix metaphors, it appears that the underpinnings of “Gradualism” in geological and local astronomic science has just taken a “catastrophic impact.”
Warning: Sarc Alert!!!/
“Voice Of God: Before the Beginning there was this Turtle. And the Turtle was alone. And he looked around, and he saw his neighbor, which was his Mother. And he lay down on top of his neighbor, and behold, she bore him in tears, an oak tree. Which grew all day, and then fell over, like a bridge. And lo, under the bridge there came a Catfish, and he was very big, and he was walking, and he was the biggest he had seen. [Fading] And so were the firey [sic] balls of this fish, one of which is the Sun, and the other, they called the Moon…
Expert Voice: Yes, some uncomplicated peoples still believe this myth. But here, in the technical vastness of the Future, we can guess that surely the Past was very different. We can surmise, for instance, that these two great balls… [Cross fading]
Dr. Technical [fading up]: We know for certain, for instance, that for some reason, for some time in the beginning, there were hot lumps. Cold and lonely, they whirled noiselessly through the black holes of space. Those insignificant lumps came together to form the first union—our Sun, the heating system. And about this glowing gasbag rotated the Earth, a cat’s-eye among aggies, blinking in astonishment across the Face of Time…
We were covered with a molten scum of rock, bobbing on the surface like rats. Later, when there was less heat, these giant rock groups settled down among the land masses. During this extinct time, our earth was like a steam room – and no one, not even man, could get in. However, the oceans and the sewers were simmering with a rich protein stew and the mountains moved in to surround and protect them. They didn’t know then that living, as we know it, was already taken over.
Animals without backbones hid from each other, or fell down. Clambasaurs and oysterettes appeared as appetizers – then came the sponges, which sucked up about 10 percent of all life. Hundreds of years later, in the late Devouring Period, the fish became obnoxious. Trailerbites, Chickerbites, and Mosqwitoes collided aimlessly in the dense gas. Finally, tiny edible plants sprang up in rows – giving birth to generations of insecticides and other small, dying creatures.
Millions of months passed and, 28 days later, the moon appeared. This small change was reflected best, perhaps, in the sand dollar, which shrank to almost nothing in the bottom of the pool. Where even dumb amphibians like catfish laid their eggs in the boiling waters, only to be gobbled up every 3 minutes by the giant sea orphans (which scared everybody).
And so, in fear and hot water, man is born:
“I am La Brea man, I am first man – wife and I live in pits. I discover pain and boredom and how to use hands in self-defense.”
“I am his son, I am called Plow Man – I was the first to dig the earth and make the rivers run backwards. There was no stopping me.”
“I am his many cousins – I chip the stone. I smelt the rock. I lay the asphalt. Together, we made enough noise to keep the wolves awake.”
“I am his godson, Civilized Man. I harnessed the secret of the calendar and the power of the wig to build the pyramids.”
“I am his mentor, Hypocricies. I put him through school, where he learned to stand up for a principle and sit down on his own stool.”
“I am his father, Caesarian. I sent him away from home for something to live on and paid him to fight over it.”
So now, everywhere he went, man dropped a great load of knowledge – forming a rich compost where slumbered the modifying spark of humanity.”
Sarc off/
Transcribed from radio theater.
Firesign Theater- 1971, “I Think We Are All Bozos On This Bus”