Is this something we could plan and manage to launch an orbiter/lander to in time? Has anyone thought about the possibility of slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?
If you launch your telescope on a spacecraft and get it to match speed with the dwarf planet (which is necessary for a soft landing), there's not much point in actually attaching it to the dwarf planet. That just blocks the view of half the sky.
Also, there will be nothing to see out there other than the dwarf planet itself.
Is that really true? If we manage to get a spacecraft get captured by the dwarf planet's gravity and orbit it, would that not be a lot less delta-V compared to if we made the spacecraft achieve the dwarf planet's orbit around the sun just by itself?
Yes, this is an aspect of orbital mechanics that people find unintuitive before they study it. You can't be captured by a planet's gravity alone. If you come in from infinity (i.e., not already captured) you will escape to infinity (remain not captured). The basic idea can be seen from the fact that gravitational dynamics are time-reversible, so if gravity could capture you like this you could also start in orbit around a planet and spontaneously be ejected.
Now, something like this can work if you use an irreversible interaction like aerobreaking, but this dwarf planet has negligible atmosphere. You could also use the dwarf planet for a gravitational assist (basically bouncing off it like a billiard ball), but I think gravitational assists from the other planets are almost always more convenient and effective.
It can reduce the delta-V requirements, though - by the same principles as a gravity assist, a capture burn (especially into a loosely-bound planet-centric orbit) often takes less work than burning into the equivalent heliocentric orbit on your own.
> by the same principles as a gravity assist, a capture burn
Note to the audience: these mechanisms don’t violate the conservation of energy because you aren’t tapping the object’s gravitational energy per se but instead its orbital energy around the sun. Put another way, you can’t do a gravity assist or capture burn in any direction.
The usual way I explain it is as a transfer of kinetic energy and momentum from the large body to the small one. The interaction is through gravity, rather than the mix of electrostatic, degeneracy, and strong/weak forces involved in collisions; but the equations are more or less the same.
(Usually textbooks use a baseball bouncing off a semi truck to illustrate.)
> Oberth effect from fast flyby of a body with low gravity would be negligible.
Pretty sure the problem would be, rather, that a flyby of a body with low gravity would be negligibly fast (relative to your speed when not flying by). Oberth effect is because of high speed (a given increase in momentum gives more kinetic energy at higher speed than at lower speed) - it's just that dipping deep into a gravity well is the obvious way to get that speed.
I came here to reply to the parent comment's remark about "irreversible interaction like aerobreaking, but this dwarf planet has negligible atmosphere." by mentioning lithobraking because it's been consuming my thoughts for the past couple of months.
Like, imagine a collapsible rod about a kilometer long sticking off the end of a space probe, lined up so it hits the surface as close to perpendicular as possible, each segment made of appropriate material for its impact speed. (I think once you go past the speed of sound in a material, you can't transfer any more force)
With the far end of the rod, which impacts first and with the most force probably vaporizing/creating a crater on the surface (useful to align the rest of the rod), and later sections crumpling in on themselves predictably, like a highway crash barrier or car hood. With a certain max amount of Acceleration, Jerk, Snap, etc... that the probe can survive.
I would very much like someone to explain why decelerating a spacecraft like this is infeasible/inefficient so I can stop thinking about it.
Failing that, I wish to devote the next few years of my life to jamming a massive spear into the moon.
First off, mass. Mass is everything in spaceflight. A rod like that would weigh thousands of kg at the very minimum, likely much more than the rest of the spacecraft combined. Spending the same mass budget for propellant and a big rocket engine would be much more efficient, never mind being useful for arbitrary velocity changes rather than just deceleration.
Second, shape and volume. How would you even launch a km-long rod to space? Not going to fit onto any launch vehicle ever devised. Besides, even at 1g it would collapse under its own weight. Making it telescoping would just increase total volume besides adding complexity – and mass, did I mention mass? Never mind that a collapsible rod is going to have a vastly lower compressive strength than a solid one, making it nigh useless for the intended purpose.
Third, moment of inertia. A long, massive rod stuck to your spacecraft is going to make orientation changes really difficult. And orientation changes are pretty important in spaceflight due to heat management, course corrections, and, well, being in the exact right orientation for your braking maneuver.
Fourth, the concept of a hypervelocity rod falling from space reminds me of something… yeah, kinetic bombardment, aka "rods from God" [1]. The rod and whatever it's going to hit are not going to behave like solid objects crumpling like a crashing car. Stuff at the point of impact is just going to instantly vaporize and result in an explosion likely in the kiloton range, a fried spacecraft, and a big crater on the surface.
Fifth, even if you first decelerate to more reasonable speeds by other means (which is going to take a lot of fuel because of the extra mass (see, again the m word)), a rod much longer than its diameter is not going to nicely crumple into itself under compression. It will buckle, and then snap, like a piece of spaghetti, failing to decelerate much at all but sending your spacecraft tumbling out of control.
~ ~ ~
All that said, there are instances where crumple zones have had a small role in spaceflight, including the the Apollo Lunar Module which included crushable honeycomb shock absorbers in the landing gear struts.
Seriously, the tandem failures of the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Observer missions were probably something NASA as an organization needed at the time. A reminder that Space Is Hard, and you can only pick two of "faster", "better", and "cheaper". Since then, NASA's Mars program has grown in both scope and ambition, yet remarkably has had zero loss-of-mission failures during that whole time!
After Pathfinder someone from NASA wrote a book about their new "faster, better, cheaper" approach to missions. Usually you can't have all 3 but they managed to get lucky. That made it particularly amusing when the book and concept were getting popular as the next 2 missions were failing.
Most of the velocity of Pathfinder was shed using aerobraking and parachutes. The crash-balloon landing system just shed the last tiny sliver of velocity after cutting the chutes.
Ah, yeah, you could call airbags lithobraking. I thought you referred ironically to the Mars Polar Lander, but it of course flew in the 1999 launch window rather than 1997.
It's a cool idea, but seems super sci-fi. Might need some wonder materials to make it feasible, even then that would be a really big crumple zone. Or flubber. Another crazy idea: latch on to the planet from the side, like a skateboarder hitching a ride by hanging on to a truck. Again, wonder materials required.
NASA and the Soviets didn't need any wonder materials, just airbags. (Though they did a lot of braking first - either with the atmosphere for NASA at Mars, or with thrusters for the Soviets at the Moon.)
> You can't be captured by a planet's gravity alone
Technically, this isn't completely true. There are gravity assist techniques that will allow you to dump speed by essentially adding your momentum to the object you are trying to orbit. The is basically an anti-slingshot manuever.
In practice, I believe the range of scenarios when this is possible with a dwarf planet is so small as to be practically useless.
In a two-body system it doesn’t matter what you do; gravity is a conservative force so conservation of energy demand that you leave the body’s SoI at the same speed you entered it (in the body’s frame of reference).
You can lose speed or alter course relative to another body in a single encounter, and those changes can reduce speed in future encounters, but if you’re on an escape trajectory heading in you stay in one (without forces beside two-body gravity, which is a pretty safe assumption 11 AU out of Saturn doesn’t come close).
> In a two-body system it doesn’t matter what you do;
Two-body systems do not exist in reality.
Energy is also conserved in 3 body problems. When you utilize the slingshot effect, some of the energy of the orbit of the body you are swinging around orbiting is transfered to you. The transfer of this energy does not depend on the closeness of the sun, but rather on how deeply you descend into the gravity well of the object you are slingshotting around.
> which is a pretty safe assumption 11 AU out of Saturn doesn’t come close
No, it really isn't. The "safeness" of the assumption entirely depends on your margin for error. The existence of the naturally captured saturnian satellites clearly indicates that you are simply wrong about the relevant margins for error.
Saturn's captured satellites might also be the result of incidental aerobraking or whatever you want to call smashing into a bunch of very tiny satellites during a close periapsis, no?
You need some sort of subsequent acceleration to raise the perigree out of the atmosphere so the orbit doesn't continue to decay. This could happen due to a slingshot effect, but atmospheric braking alone is not enough to allow you to establish a stable orbit.
> gravitational dynamics are time-reversible, so if gravity could capture you like this you could also start in orbit around a planet and spontaneously be ejected.
I don't have a strong background in physics, and perhaps this is splitting hairs, but is this true if we consider gravitational radiation? Over a very long time a body's orbital energy will be lost to gravitational waves.
It would be like saying all the school children exercises and train timetables are invalid because they don't take into account relativistic effects that obviously are still present at 60mph.
Technically? Yes! Incoming gravitational radiation of precisely the correct shape will in fact un-decay a orbit under exactly the same (modulo appropiate symmetries) circumstances as a orbit would decay by emitting (the reverse of) that radiation. (The same applies to thermal radiation cooling things off - see Liouville's Theorem.)
For practical purposes, that'll never happen, but for practical purposes gravitation radiation doesn't matter anyway.
Over a very long time, we are all very dead. From what I understand, the loss in gravitational energy would be so tiny, the length of time required for it to eventually matter in any way would be way beyond the lifespan of the sun. So it's only a finite duration if you have infinite time, which you don't.
That's pretty cool. It's wildly counterintuitive, but if it weren't the case, the planets would be orbited by lots of captured asteroids and debris, instead of/in addition to being covered in craters. The only explanation for why that doesn't happen is that it can't happen.
> The presence of natural satellites indicates this can indeed happen
No, it doesn't, because natural satellites are generally not captured, and for those that are captured, the process involves interactions with other bodies.
One of the criteria for planethood is an assumption that the body clears its own orbit. Moons don't just come hurtling out of the cosmos; they either result from a collision of some other body with the planet, as with our Moon, or they're already close to the planet's orbit at the time they are captured.
>One of the criteria for planethood is an assumption that the body clears its own orbit.
Is that so?
"The generic definition of a centaur is a small body that orbits the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune and crosses the orbits of one or more of the giant planets"
There are tens of thousands, so perhaps the definition of a planet is even more abstruse than people let on.
And apparently at least dozens have been identified as probably of interstellar origin, while it is thought that a centaur can become a moon, (e.g. Phoebe) so I wonder if we can really rule out that moons "come hurtling out of the cosmos":
"Being able to tell apart interstellar asteroids from native asteroids born in the Solar System has long eluded astronomers, but the team’s results identified 19 asteroids of interstellar origin. These are currently orbiting as part of the group of asteroids known as Centaurs, which roam the space in between the giant planets of the Solar System."
Yes, it is. The definition of "clearing an orbit" isn't precisely defined, but it doesn't have to be since there appears to be a large natural gap in how much orbit clearing an planet does vs. a dward planet.
> A large body that meets the other criteria for a planet but has not cleared its neighbourhood is classified as a dwarf planet. That includes Pluto, whose orbit intersects with Neptune's orbit and shares its orbital neighbourhood with many Kuiper belt objects. The IAU's definition does not attach specific numbers or equations to this term, but all IAU-recognised planets have cleared their neighbourhoods to a much greater extent (by orders of magnitude) than any dwarf planet or candidate for dwarf planet.[0]
It's a dwarf planet of ~ 200 km diameter. The thing has a miniscule gravity well, it won't matter much compared to launching from earth and matching orbits with it, i think...
For comparison, that's about 10% of the Moon's diameter, i.e. 0.1% of its volume. (The mass ratios are probably within that 0.1% ballpark, but can't tell for sure until we know more about its composition.)
Interestingly, the images came from the Dark Energy Survey [1], which for entirely different different reasons is running a very sensitive and high-resolution scan of the sky in visible and near-infrared. This just happened to show up in a frame where they were looking for distant galaxies and events, and the Minor Planets Center noticed the thing.
Could a probe have a long tethered anchor, so as it does it's flyby the friction of the anchor dragging the surface would shed more delta-V than the weight of the system (in comparison to just loading up on more propellant)?
> there's not much point in actually attaching it to the dwarf planet.
I've been thinking that attaching a sabatier reactor to a probe and sending it to land on an extra solar body such as Oumuamua that contains the ingredients that the sabatier needs to produce fuel would be a great way to get a probe that sends signals back to Earth well after a nuclear battery has died.
Just launch a deep-space telescope; it would be easier.
Soft-landing the telescope on an airless body would be harder (in delta-V terms) than just launching it into an equivalent solar orbit. And the body would block about half your view of the sky at any one time.
No, that's not how gravity boosts work. If you match speeds with an object you actually get zero boost.
The point of a gravity boost is to come in pretty hot (relative to the body you're boosting off of) and then go out pretty hot in a different direction. So you take your relative velocity vector at the point of the encounter and twist it around. By doing that you change your orbital energy around your central body (the sun) by a lot, and the other object will lose a similar amount to keep the bookkeeping equal.
If you have zero relative velocity compared to the thing you want a gravity assist off of you can't get an assist. It isn't like drafting a semi.
Interesting, do you mind explaining how the "other object will lose a similar amount"? I find orbital mechaics fascinating and understand the concept of a slingshot, but I can intuitively understand how if we launched a rocket and slingshotted it around the moon, the moon would be affected by that
Could there be some energy advantage to being in orbit around it? I'm thinking of a scenario where you spend a large amount of energy once get into orbit around the object, but then gain a small amount of energy continuously through something like tidal forces.
Everything else is going to be small and average out over time. And if you manage to pick up a bit of energy orbiting a tiny object you'll quickly just get ejected at its (small) escape velocity. Whatever that gives you, it won't be worth the cost of matching orbits to start with. Better to come in hot and slingshot.
Solar wind / radiation pressure is probably the next best free ride since that adds up over time continuously and is everywhere.
I think the point is that in order to follow it, you need to (at some point in time) be at the same place and with the same velocity. Then you'll follow it.
But the energy required to do that is almost the same as what it would be if the dwarf planet wasn't there. You could get onto exactly the same orbit for roughly the same amount of energy, and if you relax the requirement that there be a dwarf planet nearby, you can choose superior orbits.
For the best gravity assist you want to have a large delta V, and you want to come in on a hyperbolic orbit that causes you to turn by 90 degrees.
This object has all of the delta V that you could want, but for an object of that mass, the hyperbolic orbit would require going through the planetoid which you can't do. And if it was dense enough that you could (for example a miniature black hole), the tidal forces during the turn would be insane.
So no, this object cannot give a decent slingshot.
The magnitude of the slingshot boost increases with the mass of the planetary body. This thing is smaller than any of the planets so you’d get a much smaller boost. The best planet for slingshotting from is Jupiter because it’s the most massive.
The easiest way to think about this is as perfectly elastic collision between the spacecraft and the planet (mediated by gravity, but this is an unnecessary detail already).
It's probably more interesting to study the object itself.
I assume its orbital period is long enough that it won't be back near the central solar system for a very long time. But similar objects could have interesting uses.
One thought experiment is to consider what it would take to be able to live on such an object, perhaps even a rogue planet just floating between the stars.
It would be very cold. Presumably you'd be reliant on nuclear fission or fusion for power, so you'd need a significant fuel supply that could effectively last indefinitely. And you'd want to have a ready supply of all the basic elements you need. Which seems more realistic the bigger the object is. Like, an Earth or Mars-sized rogue planet might be ideal.
Like till it gets closer we dont even know if it would be suitable to put something like that on it.
Although it does seem like interesting idea.
However, we have sent probes much further than this object (aka the voyager missions).
So it would mainly be useful for studying this object. So a telescope would be less than ideal since we could always in theory deploy a telescope much deeper into space if we wanted.
Interestingly, the voyager missions were also timed-events -- they were launched when they were because JPL realized it was a 1-in-175-year alignment of the outer planets that made it feasible to launch just a few crafts to visit the outer planets all in one go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
Landing a telescope on it would only make sense if orbits around it are highly unstable (like our moon) and if the dwarf planet was geothermally active so energy on the surface would be "easy" to extract (which comes with it's own set of headaches). Orbiting it with a "big for space probes" camera would most likely give us more interesting data.
Using the plant as a Coronagraph if orbiting far out is another interesting idea, but using a near earth astroid would be a better idea as the telescope could be powered by solar panels they.
> slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?
While this object will eventually orbit pretty far away in a solar system context, I suspect that additional distance may not be vast enough to make a meaningful improvement in observations of targets at interstellar distances.
I'd love to learn if I'm incorrect but I've always assumed for interstellar observation, larger sensors and more sensors has better ROI than a more distant sensor, at least short of some substantial fraction of a light year. If we're going to dedicate a 100 ton Starship payload to interstellar observing I imagine going much farther out than the Moon's shadow may not be a good trade (eg fuel mass vs payload mass).
Too far out from the sun and it wouldn't be able to re-charge using solar panels. Could put some kind of nuclear power plant on it though. And as others has pointed out, you would need to match the speed, so you could just as well use that power plus gravity assists to get far out. Landing on such a body would be really interesting though.
Let's send some boosters out there, redirect it to earth, and make a second moon. Come on people, what ever happened to doing shit cause its fuckin' rad, do you know how cool another moon would be?!
Then again, global warming is going to flood huge coastal areas, killing or displacing millions, which is a pretty uncool thing we're doing to ourselves, so maybe Second Moon will counter-act that? There's literally no way of knowing until we try. And worst case scenario, we ruin a bunch of earth and we've got a second moon to move to. Its a win-win.
Bringing a large celestial body close to Earth would be just as smart as trying to let the aliens know that we are here. (The humanity may not be able to survive either one.)
For reference 1 AU (Astronomical Unit) is about 150 million km. Saturn ranges from being about 7 to 11 AU away from Earth. Voyager 1 is 152 AU away. This object is excitingly close and will be fun to study.
Is it possible to get a probe out that far in time to make a good intercept?
I imagine with this (relatively) short notice this is cutting it a bit close to orchestrate a proper orbital insertion by a designed, manufactured and tested program?
Some context:
It took Cassini-Huygens 7 years to reach saturn with two venus and one jupiter flyby.
It took New Horizons 9 years to reach pluton with jupiter flyby.
With Inclination of 95.467° and Argument of perihelion of 326.285° flyby could happen near to Ecliptic but for getting to orbit one would need a nice gravity assist from jupiter.
Maybe this will motivate us to finally design and launch a probe that launches in two or more launches, all but one of which are fuel.
All our normal expectations for probe arrival times and such are based on one-shot launches, straight out of Earth's gravity well into escape velocity in one shot. It's not like launching with fuel suddenly makes it a two-day trip or anything, but it can do quite a bit of shortening and allow for quite a lot more maneuvering.
This is one of the next touchstones in space progress I've been looking for. A lot of previously impractical things become practical if we can routinely do multilaunches.
This is not a ridiculous question and does not deserve a mean answer.
Voyager 1 has been flying for over 43 years [0]. In that time it went over 150 AU. This averages about 3.5 AU/year. It took, from start of project to launch, about 5 years (1972 - 1977 [1]).
If this body is going to be 11 AU away in 10 years away we'd need to move at an average 2.2 AU/year and hit the right launch windows.
I think that it falls into the "yes, it's possible" but not into the "of course it's possible, how could you even ask" category.
> For the sake of simplicity, Saturn is 1.2 billion km, roughly 7 AU, from the Earth when the two are at their closest approach to one another. They are 1.67 billion km, around 11 AU, from each other when they are at their most distant. Saturn and Earth are the closest to each other when they are on the same side of the Sun and at similar points in their orbits. The are the most distant when on opposite sides of the Sun.
Saturn's perihelion (closest distance to the Sun) is 1.35B km (9.0 AU), its aphelion (furthest distance) is 1.51B km (10.1 AU), and its mean distance is 1.43B km (9.6 AU).
Thus, at closest approach Saturn is 8 AU from Earth (since Earth orbits at an almost-constant 1 AU from the Sun).
I think "pretty much everyone" is an exaggeration. Google's pronunciations (British and US) are both the 'anus' version -- though the British one has a secondary stress on the first syllable, rather than the schwa of the US version.
Growing up in Australia, the British 'you-ray-nəs' (i.e. not quite 'your anus', but only because of the first vowel sound) is the pronunciation I was familiar with. Lately I've heard 'you-rə-nəs' fairly often, but not exclusively.
in Arabic (and a bunch of other languages I'm sure) it's pronounced: Oranos, I don't understand why the U in Uranus is not pronounced like the U in Ultra.
Hope I can contribute, because this is actually very interesting. According to this [1], the most common American pronunciation was closer to "Your anus" (accent on the A in anus) until 1986, when a space probe was flying by and news casters thought weeks of that would get too "giggly", so they deliberately started pronouncing it "Urine us" (accent on the first syllable).
Thank you. That was amusing to read and I never actually realized there was so much about the pronunciation, I've heard a few different ones. but I always took it for regional dialect differences not something done intentionally. I may have sounded sarcastic, but I was genuinely serious, I really do enjoy the interesting factoids spawned by sometimes the most innocuous comments on HN. HN really does have a lot of people knowledgeable about a huge range of things.
You might but that is an incorrect pronunciation and the only time I’ve heard that (other than from people who aren’t into astronomy) was in elementary school and even then the teacher told us it was a common, but wrong, pronunciation.
A thread of people discussing pronunciations without saying where they are from or using IPA is a pointless waste of time. You may as well be talking about what time it is by posting “well, it’s dark here!”
Location/accent is important, but sometimes we can get by without IPA. There will be some ambiguity, but often we're sufficiently familiar with each other's accents to interpret phonetic spellings as intended. (Though I do think the ə symbol is indispensable, because representing the schwa sound with 'uh' is just confusing.)
edit: sorry, just realised I probably misread you (as saying we should say where we're from and use IPA), in which case this comment is redundant.
It's not a rogue planet, that implies Interstellar. This is an object with a very long orbit that takes it out to he Oort cloud but still - a permanent resident of the solar system.
It's basically just an exceptionally large comet. It's not Melancholia.
> I would estimate at an albedo of 0.01-0.08 a diameter of 130-370 kilometers (nominally 160) which puts it on a similar scale, if not larger than, Sarabat's huge comet C/1729 P1, and almost undoubtedly the largest Oort Cloud object ever discovered- almost in dwarf planet territory!
For reference, a nominal 160km diameter would put it around the same size as the 40th largest asteroid known. Huge for an object coming from the oort cloud, but not really huge in comparison to other rocky bodies in the solar system.
It's an old unit, so there wasn't a global standard yet, and it's exact value wasn't known for a long time, but it was still useful for ratios. E.g. if you observe the orbit time of another planet, you can tell its distance from the sun relative to the distance of Earth to Sun (1 astronomical unit) relatively accurately, even if you can't measure what it is in meters very well.
It's one of those things that I still tilt my head slightly at when thinking about how the human brain struggles with really large numbers. Its just an odd thing.
In a case like this, I suspect it has more to do with visualizing the solar system rather than how large something is. When we speak in AU, we can create a mental model with the Sun, Earth, and other object since everything is normalized to the size of Earth's orbit. When we speak in kilometers, a bit of arithmetic has to be done before creating the model. Regardless of the units though, we aren't directly visualizing the distances since they will be outside the scope of human experience until we actively start traveling the solar system.
I have more trouble with parsec. I have a rough idea of how big our galaxy is in light years and some idea about nearby stars. Age of the universe helps anchor things in billions of light years. Then suddenly something is measured in parsecs. Probably a similar thing for the experts.
Astronomers could reasonably well measure angles between objects in the night sky, and with some basic geometry, you can measure the relative distances between objects reasonably accurately. For instance, if you have a triangle ABC, and you know the angle ABC is 45 degrees, and the angle ACB is also 45 degrees, you know that the distance AB will be sqrt(2)/2 times the distance BC. If you have dozens of other points you want to know about, you can calculate the distances relative to BC as well. But what if you haven't the foggiest idea how many toises long BC is? (this was well before the metric system; toises was the unit of choice for Cassini) You either give units of toises for, for instance, the size of the Mars orbit with error bars of +/- 80%, or you give the size of the Mars orbit in terms of multiples of BC with error bars of +/- 5%.
Measuring the AU is fraught with errors of all sorts. For centuries it mostly consisted of exploiting tiny parallaxes on the Earth's surface between planetary bodies- for instance, Cassini and Richtie measured the parallax of Mars between Paris and French Guiana. But a small error propagates to a much, much larger error in the final result than relative distances between planetary bodies in AU distances. If your measurement of the parallax of Mars is off by one arcminute, your measurement is totally useless, but if your measurement of the angle to Mars is off by one arcminute, your distance to Mars in AUs is off by a few percent.
It wasn't until the 1960s when the JPL measured distances to Venus and Mars using radar that we were confident we had a good grasp on how long an AU was. But by that point, we had already measured the relative distances between the bodies in the solar system using the AU ruler relatively accurately for centuries.
I believe this is absolute magnitude, and specifically, absolute magnitude as defined for comets [1]. At Saturn's distance, definitely not a naked-eye object in any case.
Not in this case: the +13 figure is a predicted *apparent* magnitude. The absolute magnitude 'H' as your link defines is the 'H' field in the OP link, which is +7.8. (Note that's 'H' from your link's section on asteroid magnitudes, not comets or stars -- they're all on different scales).
Here's the documentation for the fields in OP's data table:
"H Absolute visual magnitude. A table converting H to a diameter is available."
Ah, thanks. So its H_asteroid is currently +7.8, and if/when it develops a coma it should become a lot brighter, but unfortunately even at perihelion still way too faint for a naked eye.
Am I right to interpret this as meaning that the body has an extreme inclination, almost in polar orbit of the Sun? That would be pretty interesting; it would mean an orbit completely out of line with the rest of the Solar System.
But it's not that interesting or unusual. The Oort cloud doesn't really obey the plane of the solar system the way the planets or Kuiper belt do. That's why it's called a 'cloud' and not a 'belt'.
Certainly interesting, but not necessarily surprising. The Oort Cloud is roughly spherical so inclination would be expected to be isotropic overall. On average there will be less high inclination bodies (isotropic inclination has a pdf of sin(i)) but they will still exist.
It can definitely feel not as cool from a popular science perspective but there are many unanswered questions about the Oort Cloud so study of this object would be scientifically invaluable, even if it doesn't yield any "pop-sci" results.
I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
Love the creativity! That said, the moon stabilized earth’s rotation angle, giving us the seasons, and it also drives huge chunks of life ecosystems and weather with the tides. So adding a second body in rotation to Earth with such superpowers would muck with a lot of stuff along the way. Maybe put it around Mars instead?
The diameter of this asteroid is estimated to be ~160 km, which is 21.7 times less than Moon with d=3474 km. Assuming similar density, the mass of the new asteroid is 10000 less than Moon and it's unlikely to affect much.
Ah, ok, good to know! When I read "dwarf planet", I automatically assumed it to be bigger than (or at least comparable in size to) the moon, which is a mere sattelite of a small planet. Then again, even Pluto, which was considered for a long time to be an "actual" planet, is smaller than the moon...
Earth's moon is freakishly large by moon standards, as it turns out!
> At about one-quarter the diameter of Earth (comparable to the width of Australia), it [the Moon] is the largest natural satellite in the Solar System relative to the size of its planet, the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System overall, and is larger than any dwarf planet.
I'm not sure how the mechanics of a 200 km wide comety like object hitting Mars at ~25 km/s would work out, but I'm reasonably certain that it would result in a major resurfacing event. I'd venture that the majority of the gasses would retain escape velocity following impact.
Slowing it down would take way more energy than just nudging in a different direction. You might be better off trying to break it up into smaller pieces.
how would we aerobreak it in mars's atmosphere into a decaying orbit, so instead of slamming into mars, it breaks up and rains down on mars? What can we tell about the composition - a solid rock or icy rubble?
The martian atmosphere will have a negligible impact on a 200km wide object. Tidal forces would likely shred the object and the surface of Mars if an aerobraking maneuver was attempted.
You get it into an orbit that will have several close encounters with Mars or other planets with atmosphere and you do a bit of aerobraking/thrusting on each pass.
I keep hoping we'll get lucky in my lifetime and something big like that will just hit Mars on it's own.
It would be a hell of a world to go from "desert" to "so we've got all these new oceans to name and also you can't breathe it but ground level pressure is one atmosphere".
An entire fragmented comet impacted Jupiter in 1994
> Over the next six days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km (7,500 mi) across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal).[24] Two impacts 12 hours apart on July 19 created impact marks of similar size to that caused by fragment G, and impacts continued until July 22, when fragment W struck the planet.[25]
> Although the impacts took place on the side of Jupiter hidden from Earth, Galileo, then at a distance of 1.6 AU (240 million km; 150 million mi) from the planet, was able to see the impacts as they occurred.
I say, better to have it happen on Mars than on Earth! Such an event would probably even have the positive effect of raising awareness and increasing funding of programmes that monitor asteroids hazardous to earth and technologies to deflect them.
Why not tow it into Venus or Mars orbit instead? They could do with the benefits of having a decent sized moon. It would make terraforming and long term habitation more straightforward and likely to succeed as well as providing lots of useful materials feedstock atop the gravity well.
What sort of propulsion mechanisms (even those that are currently physically plausible but entirely outside our technology, so, for example, solar sails or nuclear torchships, but not, say, warp drive) could possibly be used to achieve such a task?
So, an interesting thing about high eccentricity orbits like 2014 UN271 has, is that they have a much higher ratio of energy (kinetic and potential) to momentum around the sun than a nearly circular orbit like say, Earth has. One can think of an orbit as being a superposition of a purely circular orbit and a purely radial one, with all the momentum around the sun being in the circular one. Any leftover energy above what is needed for the circular component goes into the radial component. In this case, almost all the energy is in the radial component.
What this means is that if do you have a way to move it into a circular orbit around the sun, you could gain energy from the process, rather than having it cost energy. Maybe the best way to gather that energy, and possibly to move it as well, would be through gravitational assists, since they are lossless kinematic interactions. The energy gathered could then be used to build more of whatever is doing the interaction, exponentially speeding up the process.
Just for fun, I did some ballpark calculations. Let's consider the simpler problem of just putting 2014 UN271 into a circular orbit around the sun at its periapsis of 11 AU.
Calculating the exact path of an orbiting body under thrust is difficult. But the object will be within 1% of the desired orbital radius for roughly a 22-degree arc of its orbit centered on the periapsis, during which time its path will be closely approximated by a circular arc 648 million km long.
Let's say that over the course of this arc, we want to slow it from its initial speed of 12.7 km/s to the required circular orbital speed of 9.0 km/s. That means we need a continuous deceleration of roughly 0.00006 m/s^2 over a period of 2 years.
Assume that we'll produce this thrust by launching material from the object into space using mass drivers. By the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, the smaller the fraction of the object that we want to use as reaction mass, the larger our "exhaust" velocity has to be. If we want to only lose 10% of the total starting mass, we need our exhaust velocity to be about 10x the total desired delta-V -- that is, 37 km/s, or roughly 0.01% the speed of light. This is a tall order, but let's say we can somehow solve the engineering problems and build a linear accelerator that can get rocks moving that fast.
Assume the object is 160 km in diameter and made entirely of ice, giving it a total mass of about 2.0e18 kg. The total required momentum change is therefore about 7.5e21 kg m/s, and the required energy input is 1.4e26 J. If we assume constant thrust for two years, this means we would have to launch about 3.2 million tons of material per second, averaging out to 2.2 exawatts of power required.
To put this number in perspective, it's several million times higher than the average electricity generation of the entire planet Earth. To generate this much power using 100%-efficient solar panels, at a distance of 11 AU from the sun, you would need a solar array approximately half the diameter of the sun itself.
So a direct propulsion approach, at least, doesn't really seem like it's within the realm of feasibility.
Scott Manley had a recent video talking about the work involved in moving the Earth, that you might find interesting. Basically the most "plausible" approach might be to move the moon and use it to drag the Earth. Similarly the best way to move another large object might be to carefully move other objects small amounts to do precise gravity assists.
While we can't 'solve' the three body problem, we can make increasingly accurate estimations. Enough to usually get orbital mechanics right in the short-term.
For a setting where we were getting it right until we got it wrong, see Niven's "A World out of Time".
Only if the target was far and we did it in one shot. Otherwise you’d just measure the state of things and make corrections for your next maneuver, the way we do for trips outside Earth’s orbit today.
Nuclear would do it. Essentially use the dwarf planet itself as reaction mass, accelerating it with either nuclear thermal propulsion or a nuclear powered mass driver.
Highly impractical, and would take centuries to slow it down enough.
I want nothing more than for my species to enter the federation of species with a reputation for being the ones who did that absolutely ridiculous prank using 10% of their GDP for a century.
Reminded me of the game Bungie made pre-Halo called Marathon, which mostly took place on a colony ship that was made out of one of Mar's moons (Deimos)
How are you going to deal with the imbalance in charge? It's likely that the to-be-moon has a very large charge differential between it and the Sun, but also likely between us and it.
New Horizons took a nearly straight shot to Pluto (just stopping by Jupiter on the way for a gravity assist). That trip took 9 years to travel 40 AU (not at constant speed, of courses, since it's constantly being drawn toward the Sun). This dwarf planet makes its closest approach at 10 AU, so you could do a fly by in less than 3 years if you wanted to pay for it. However, the science return from a flyby would be limited compared to falling into orbit around it.
Rosetta took 10 years to match pace with and orbit a comet (which had a closest approach to the Sun less than 1 AU) using a number of gravity assists.
Getting into orbit would be rather difficult, as the probe would have have to match the planets velocity at perihelion. My instinct says it’s probably just on the edge of doable (although I’m not sure on which side), but I haven’t crunched the numbers. It would almost certainly need to be launched on a Delta-IV or Falcon Heavy class vehicle.
EDIT: s/perigee/perihelion. I could say periapse and be neutral, but perihelion sounds cool.
The speed of Rosetta's comet at perigee is, I think, significantly grater than the max speed of this dwarf planet. The dwarf planet has a much higher apogee, of course, but escape velocity, corresponding to infinite apogee, is finite and not that large, and Rosetta had to go much deeper into the Sun's gravity well. So, as a non-expert who hasn't done the numbers, I'd guess matching pace with the dwarf planet would be easier (requiring less delta V and/or gravity assists) than Rosetta with the comet.
Somewhat unintuitively, thanks to the Oberth effect, it can be easier to reach escape velocity closer to an object, (Humorously portrayed in https://xkcd.com/1242).
Aside: if you are looking to learn more, I cannot recommend Kerbal Space Program enough.
I've been aware of people talking about Kerbal Space Program for years and years, but I lost interest in playing it when I heard it didn't do real N-body gravitational calculations because they were too intensive.
I still find that inexplicable. To me, it sounds like saying "our calculator only does basic arithmetic on four core machines, square roots are too slow".
I'd push back against that interpretation of the developer's design choices. Kerbal's use of patched conic approximations greatly lowers the difficulty of the game (it is a game) for most players; it enables a simple and coherent UI/UX; and it guarantees fixed orbits that make difficult in-space rendezvous like the Apollo program's accessible. Like Minecraft cubes, it creates a reliable foundation of simple abstractions that people can reason about, and build complicated strategies on top of. (Wouldn't Minecraft be unplayable if instead of cubes, it was arbitrary user-defined convex polyhedra? It's like that).
Upping the realism lowers the playability: games and simulators are subtly different things. Otherwise we'd all be playing STK/Astrogator instead of Kerbal, and AutoCAD instead of Minecraft, and sitting in city hall basements debugging spreadsheets in place of Cities: Skylines. The type of limitations that distinguish games from serious simulators are not accidents and not laziness, but deliberate design choices.
I concede this makes certain interesting topics like Lagrange points / halo orbits, masscons, and orbital precession inaccessible. That's part of the tradeoff.
Not really that inexplicable, it’s a video game. It’s not for computational reasons, but to make gameplay easier to reason about; because again, it’s a video game.
The mechanics are simplified, yes, but patched conics is quite a good approximation for many cases, and great for developing an intuition for the basics.
There is a mod that includes n-body calculations called Principia if you’re interested in that.
It’s quite good as well, written in C++ for speed with new versions released every lunar cycle (!). I’ve done some Lagrange orbits with it in the Kerbol solar system. Doing it with Realism Overhaul and Real Solar System is a bit harder…
It's difficult to believe that ten years from now, there'd be any serious options other than Starship and its future peers. (Incidentally, the Delta IV is already at end-of-life; ULA is replacing it with Vulcan and its Blue Origin engines. The final Delta IV-H launches are planned for 2023).
I more meant that it would take at least that size-class of heavy lift launch vehicle.
With Starship this would definitely be doable, and I’m really optimistic about it; I just wanted to be cautious in my predictions.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if Delta IV’s life gets extended. Vulcan is facing plenty of development delays, and Blue Origin are yet to produce anything useful.
In a few years, can't we look forward to SpaceX making it routine to refuel in orbit? If we assume that's feasible, I wonder what sort of missions it would enable, other than human spaceflight.
There's no such thing as a free ride. If you can soft land on it you're already going to the Oort cloud.
You could get a free ride by having it crash into you, but that's going to be like catching a bus by letting it hit you, at ten thousand miles an hour.
Maybe starship will be ready with orbital refueling in time to make a faster trip. Imagine being able to do a sample return mission from such an object.
Note that dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits the sun at ~3 AU, is larger (⌀ = 939 km) than this one (⌀ = 100–200 km). There are ~25 other known asteroids with diameters over 200 km in the asteroid belt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exceptional_asteroids#...).
Right, but it's not the size that counts, it's the motion in the ocean. And what's on the inside. This little guy's from the Oort cloud. He's been places, he's seen things.
Apologies if this is an obvious question but I'm not familiar with astronomy. Will this dwarf planet just pass through our solar system or is there a chance it will start to orbit our sun?
Ah, for some reason I read the original message as some new dwarf planet was outside our solar system and had a trajectory towards it. Thanks for the clarification.
My intuition is that anything with a really eccentric orbit (10s to 10s of thousands of AU) has more of a chance of passing through many gravitational fields that change its orbit.
I suppose that makes sense... if something is in an orbit that's flattened down until it's only slightly off from being a straight line in and out, then any very slight perturbations could really affect how close it comes to the sun on the next pass.
The sun moves too a little bit, due to the pull of the planets. Maybe it's enough to make a difference?
It is from our solar system. It has just a very eccentric orbit, but it was always orbiting the Sun.
But for interstellar objects, the answer is always "no". Unless it passes very close to some object that there's an orbital slingshot (or a collision, the odds of both are basically zero), interstellar objects always move away.
For the most part, conservation of energy dictates that bodies in orbit will stay in orbit, and bodies transiting the system will exit it. Think of it like a ball rolling down a hill, then back up a hill of equal height. By rolling downhill, it gains enough velocity to make it back up the hill.
There are exceptions, of course. An asteroid passing through an atmosphere may be slowed down by friction (aerobraking), and be captured in orbit. Passing near another orbiting body, the interloper can be sped up or slowed down (gravity assist). But both of those require getting pretty close to a planet, and space is really big (citation needed), so it's unlikely that it would be captured.
Edit: Looks like I had the same misinterpretation, that it was a rogue planet rather than an Oort/Kuiper belt object.
According to TA it is orbiting the sun. The closest point out will be at beyond Saturn's orbit, the farthest will be 30-50k AU. Of course, there are some error bars on these numbers that I can't interpret, and given that it orbits that far out, its orbit might actually be influenced by neighboring stars as well.
It amazes me that it last visited the "inner" solar system 2.75 million years ago. And after perturbations its next approach will be 4.5 million years from now. Its aphelion distance will be about 0.8 lightyear.
If it manage to do a gravity assist maneuver around some existing planet, it might. Probability of such is very low, I believe. Moreover, I think if there was any chance, scientists already knew about it. If they keep silence, then no, there are no chances.
While scientifically-minded folks are excited for a new object of study, or simply something awesome in the night sky - I can't wait until I see the first doomsday predictions by people with a different mindset... In a way it is also an object of study for those world views ;)
Suppose this, if there are advanced civilisations doing interstellar travel and there really is a 200km object that could hit Earth (I understand this is too far out), what would be the way to ask them for help?
This is under the assumption that advancee civilizations can travel only as fast as speed of light.
There is also a possibility that there are advanced civilizations that jailbreaked the Universe/Reality and can be anywhere in seconds. Whether they give a shit about primitive civilizations like us who invented decent computers only like fifty years back is a different question altogether.
They'd be already here, though. Or at least, evidence of them being here. If the universe is infinite, all possible advanced civilization should be already here. If time/space travel was possible, I think we should have seen it or evidence of it.
Okay so if this was a direct hit, what would happen!? Would it just be a non event for the sun or could we expect higher temperatures on Earth or worse?
More importantly the video mostly talks about hitting the Sun from a platform like Earth already closely orbiting the Sun, which is not the same thing as arriving practically from interstellar space. That's much more important than the size of anything.
If you were to make a velocity change to this object in its aphelion to make it hit the Sun, it would be vastly easier (at least per unit of weight) than do the same with a probe launched from Earth.
A direct hit with the sun? Maybe slightly higher temperatures if the "impact site" was facing us, but not for long because the sun is highly convective and each "longitudinal ring" on the sun rotates differentially, thus dissipating the effects of that impact very very quickly. A good chunk of it would also probably burn up before even reaching the Sun, but how much of it is hard to say.
But keep in mind, it says "within 11 AU of the Sun", which is still beyond Saturn; Saturn's 9.5 AU away from the Sun, and Uranus is about 19 AU away from the Sun. So it's still pretty far away.
There definitely are. A major reason for "demoting" Pluto was there are more such Pluto-scale planets in the Kuiper belt. Maybe we will find one bigger than Pluto.
Thanks! That's wild to me. All talk about exoplanets and other pop-sci headlines makes you think we would have our own backyard figured out. Then again, I suppose the vastness of space is vast even within our solar system.
That body is on a cometary orbit, and need not be stable long term. If it's chaotically pushed around by the major outer planets it might get sent into an orbit that gets into the inner solar system. And if something that size hit Earth, it would be game over for life here -- the impact would vaporize much or all of the oceans.
Even an impact by something the size of comet Hale-Bopp would destroy all higher life on the planet.
The chance of impacts like this may have been underestimated because of anthropic selection -- if any had occurred in the past (say) 1 billion years then we would not be here.
I've always figured there's no point in worrying about giant planet destroying meteors, if one comes and we can't stop it, well we're all fucked. What can ya do at that point? If it can't be stopped and it can't be changed...well I guess we had a decent ride...at least it'll probably look cool before we're all vaporized.
Well, sure if it happens, i just meant in that whole inevitable no matter what doom scenario thing.
I just mean, worrying about that or being scared is not really worth it. If it happens it happens. There's better things to dedicate that energy towards. Save the worrying about things like that for the people being paid to come up with solutions in the extremely rare chance this happens within any of ours, our children's or our grand children's lifetimes, after that I dunno, I'll probably be dead by then.
I think it's largely a matter of how much advance warning we have. If we discover an object hundreds of kilometers in diameter on an orbit that will intersect with Earth in 100 years, then we'll have a better opportunity to nudge it early on so it misses entirely or develop a big enough bomb to turn it into a pile of gravel and ice chips that will (mostly) miss the Earth.
The biggest fusion bomb detonated on Earth was Tsar Bomba at 50 megatons, though the full yield is thought to have been more like 100 if the Russians hadn't deliberately nerfed it over radiation concerns.
Is there a theoretical upper limit to the yield of fusion bombs? I assume no one is building them bigger simply because there's no realistic military use for such things that wouldn't be better served by smaller accurately targeted nuclear bombs. Tsar Bomba was detonated in 1961, and no one has seen fit to repeat the experiment, though I suppose one or more of the major nuclear powers may have a modern warhead with equivalent yield that they just haven't tested or announced to the world.
Wikipedia is saying that there's thought to be a practical limit of around 6 megatons of yield per metric ton of bomb mass [1], and actual nuclear devices have achieved a little over 5, so I guess after some point there's not much reason to make a bigger bomb when you can just make two smaller ones.
This scenario is starting to sound a bit like a long-running Factorio game where the goal is to launch a rocket once a minute. With, say, a one year lead time could the economies of Earth launch a starship-style rocket with a half-dozen or so Tsar Bomba sized warhead once per day indefinitely? I think so. Would it be enough to destroy a dwarf planet? Probably not, but maybe it could knock loose enough chunks to nudge it into a slightly different orbit.
Can we not attach rockets to it just to nudge enough to barely not hit it? I don’t think anyone would suggest we “America fuck yeah” a meteor with firepower.
"A 100 km comet striking the Earth would carry ∼1000 times the energy involved in the creation of the 150 km Chicxulub crater and would presumably remove the surface biosphere"
I think people have suggested the dinosaur killing asteroid may have caused global fires and rain of molten rock, so that scale might be sufficient as far as humans are concerned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ankmTU89X_A - simulation of impact. Note scale - both size and time. Note rebound that briefly created one of largest peaks in Earths history. And curtain of ejecta.
Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.
Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.
The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.
The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.
Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.
Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.
Seems more likely that what has happened before will happen again, which is to say that Jupiter or Saturn pull it apart into asteroids and perhaps new moons.
Jupiter's orbit is roughly five AUs, and Saturn's orbit is at roughly ten, and in those regions, they have enormous influence on where stuff gets to go in the solar system.
An elliptical orbit has, instead of a center, two foci, or focuses. In a very eccentric, or sharp and skinny, ellipse like this object's orbit, there is a focus very close to each pointy end. The sun is at one of these. (There is nothing at the other.) At the point of closest approach to the sun somewhere inside (the radius of) Saturn's orbit, it will be going twice as fast as Saturn, but at almost a right angle to it, swinging past the south pole of the sun, and will then shoot out to an immense distance, slowing all the way until it slows down enough to fall back in again for another go.
Before I read that it is actually orbiting our star I briefly thought "maybe they had an accident with a nuclear waste dump on the far side of their planet"
I’m not seeing the relation other than it’s also in space (so is the earth and everything on it by the way).
Why would this do anything to spike solar flares? It’s a lump of rock and ice 130km across, further out than Saturn. What possible mechanism do you think there is that would cause that to occur?
No, no need to worry. Coronal mass ejections causing geomagnetic storms are really something to worry about but this thing is just a piece of rock flying around the Sun at very far distances (from our point of view). It is coming no closer than eleven astronomical units to Sun (1 AU is the mean distance of Earth to Sun).
There is a website that visualizes the distances in the solar system at the scale of 1 pixel to the diameter of Moon. In the lower right corner there is a symbol with a "C" and some lines around it that makes you automatically travel at the speed of light. Start the journey, put it on an extra screen if you have one and see nothing happen for most of the time ;)
The current distance from Sun is shown in the bottom center and you can change units in the menu attached to it. "Astronomical units" or "light minutes" might be the most useful, kilometers or miles if you just want to be blown away by the order of magnitude.
Also, Carrington class events are very rare. You should worry more about space junk crashing into important things and even then it’s not much of a worry.
> The analysis shows that ‘severe’ magnetic storms occurred in 42 out of the last 150 years, and ‘great’ super-storms occurred in 6 years out of 150
That seems extremely imminent, like in my lifetime. How many of these events would shut down tech for months or years? Are those odds worth risking civilization over?
