"As seen in 2022, Uranus’s north pole shows a thickened photochemical haze that looks similar to the smog over cities. Several little storms can be seen near the edge of the polar haze boundary. Hubble has been tracking the size and brightness of the north polar cap and it continues to get brighter year after year. Astronomers are disentangling multiple effects — from atmospheric circulation, particle properties, and chemical processes — that control how the atmospheric polar cap changes with the seasons. At the Uranian equinox in 2007, neither pole was particularly bright. As the northern summer solstice approaches in 2028 the cap may grow brighter still, and will be aimed directly toward Earth, allowing good views of the rings and the north pole; the ring system will then appear face-on. This image was taken on 10 November 2022."

Source: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hubble_monitors_changing_weather_and_seasons_on_Jupiter_and_Uranus

[removed]

That's funny, since black holes ARE invisible matter.

Right? 🙂

I think that’s what confused me as the post time I saw on Apollo suggested it was posted after it had already passed :)

[removed]

Funny how OP decided to be helpful and provide an alternative timestamp (the one in parenthesis), but as a true American, chose another US/Canada-specific time zone instead of something like UTC :)

[removed]

Correct, so this post was created an hour before it passed.

Edit: it's now at a distance of more than 190.000 km again

I've used the Eyes orrery to track spacecraft like New Horizons and JWST but didn't know it could do asteroids, too!

It is - zoom out and rotate the scene :-)

It is. From the perspective of the “camera” the earth Uranus are in a line. Just follow the orbital planes around

Just within range of Dr Nesbitt's defense array.

Not very high, asteroids are moving very quickly in general. Swinging by the earth will just slightly bend its trajectory rather than anything resembling sucking it in.

Yeah definitely don’t think we should be able to find them all

Your Earth-volume : lunar-orbit-volume ratio works for the likelihood of finding the asteroid inside or outside of the Earth at any given moment.

But we can assume the object has an entire path of moments passing straight through on [basically] a line. An asteroid “looking ahead” directly at the round perimeter of the Earth might briefly occupy some point “in front” of the Earth before collision… but that’s still a collision path. And it’s never gonna get to any points on the other side. What it “sees” just is a flat disc in a flat disc. It’s either heading through the empty part or not.

Perhaps they meant 64x the radius of the earth.

would be cool if earth was shown in this render!

>This asteroid is about 100X smaller than the one that killed the dinosaurs

Additional note, it is 100x smaller in linear size, which puts it around the order of a million times lighter than the chicxulub asteroid.

We'll never find them all if you include ones that are perturbed from the outer parts of the system to fall inward. And we'll definitely not find ones in time without a better search and detection program. Relying on amateur astronomers and rare free time at the major telescopes, both only done at night, it pretty limited and why so many near passes are discovered after they do pass and not before.

I do wonder if there's any validity in Asimov's prologue for Rama, where Spaceguard uses a nuclear blast (neutron?) to generate a radar image of the system to map just about everything. Of course Rama was conveniently not in this scan.

How long have we got? 3:51pm EDT is 7:31pm GMT so was this 3 hours ago so obviously it passed by already, or have I got my time conversions incorrect?

[removed]

Yes, but it’s said in like a “don’t worry!” way, but clearly we haven’t found them all.

> only be worth taking note of if it struck a population centre

If it struck the ocean I think it would still be worth noting.

[deleted]

Appreciate not being misleading with the title and calling it a "near miss" or whatever