To not bury the lead: His team studied data the government made available from military missile tracking systems, which conveniently also false-positives on asteroids. There was one in 2014 which slammed into the Pacific Ocean at a speed at least twice that of the speed stars around us move relative to the sun, which makes it likely to be extra-solar. Based on that speed & how much burned upon entry, they concluded its material must be tougher than iron. They're planning an expedition to the oceanic area around Papa New Guinea, mostly funded through private donations, to recover the object.
And here I didn't even consider the chance that it was an elaborate ruse to grab a punch of rare-earth metals. Apparently my heavy diet of sci-fi and techno thrillers hasn't trained me well enough yet. ;)
These are not rare earths, rare earths are a family of chemically similar elements close together in the periodic table that are not actually that rare geologically. Platinum and iridium are just rare elements.
Theres a great documentary about that by the name 'Azorian - The Raising of The K129 on Amazon' - I think I bought it for $1 - you should give it a watch if you haven't yet.
Or just a chunk of titanium. It's only made in novas and supernovas so having an abnormal trajectory, and speed only supports the theory. A bunch of titanium slapped onto some rock and then later breaks off or something.
Right, but titanium is stronger than steel, let alone iron.
>When compared to steel in a strength-to-weight ratio, titanium is far superior, as it is as strong as steel but 45% lighter. In fact, titanium has the highest strength-to-weight ratio of all known metals.
Strength doesn't matter here as much as melting point. When they say tougher than Iron, I imagine they mean it ablated less in the atmosphere. I don't know what elements that might mean. Certainly not platinum group metals. Tungsten possibly. Carbon or diamond. Or alien tech.
Edit:
"Based on the speed of the meteor and how much of the object burned upon entry, Loeb determined that it must be made of a material that is tougher than iron."
As your quote says, titanium has a higher strength to weight ratio. It's not necessarily stronger, and it's not necessarily "tougher" against the circumstances described than whatever type of iron they think it might be. The meteor isn't out to minimize weight. The strength to weight ratio isn't relavent here at all and does not make titanium more likely to survive until the object comes to rest on Earth.
Isn't it sort of funny that they think the asteroid might be some new material, or at least something tougher than iron, yet they are planning to use a magnet to pull up pieces? What happens if it's non-ferrous...
The fact they are bringing a magnet shows how confident they are its iron. My hypothetical scenario:
"There's a chance its not iron but something new!"
"What chance is that?"
"Its inverse to the chance we told our funders, who gave us millions to collect it with a magnet, that it was iron."
"So its pretty guaranteed its iron"
"Yup".
"Aren't your funders concerned you are saying it could be something different than iron?"
"You see the name of the university and a few corporations on the ship? Would you be talking to us if we were just getting a run of the mill iron metorite?"
It may be an iron alloy. Many of them are magnetic.
If it's an extra hard iron alloy it would be more interesting because they can analyze it and perhaps reproduce the composition and perhaps the heat process that created the meteorite.
Supposedly it's in pieces from the impact. Small samples would be fine to locate and collect via ROV with a metal detector on it to check below the silt.
If they want mass extraction after that, then potentially a form a dredging could be used (vacuum and filter could work to leave the sand and silt on the bottom).
Niobium on its own isn't even ferromagnetic, it's paramagnetic, and not very strong. However, it can be alloyed with other metals including iron and nickel to produce a stronger magnet than any pure element.
This seems a reasonable question to me, not having read the article. IIRC from grade school days, only a few metallic elements are magnetic. Iron, nickel, cobalt, and some rare earth metals. That was a long time ago and doubtless oversimplified, but please do enlighten me why it would be expected to be magnetic?
It seems like they must still be assuming it's largely made of Iron.
Ferromagnetic matter is magnetic by nature. If you look at the periodic table you'll see that most of the elements are actually metals. Below Carbon there's a line which parts metals from semi metals and non metals.
But with proper equipment you can detect non magnetic conductive materials. Not sure what's it called, but if you pass a magnet near eg. copper the magnetic force from the magnet will induce electricity on copper which in turn with also produce a slight magnetic field. There are many good YouTube videos on this topic and they're quite cool! (https://youtu.be/u7Rg0TcHQ4Y)
That's not what they're doing though. There literally going to drag a magnet across the sea floor and examine anything that sticks to it. Which will be largely iron, nickel, and cobalt. Were it to be alien tech, it probably won't have large amounts of those and won't stick to the magnet. At least it seems that way to me. Could you make a magnet that would create a strong enough attraction to pick up a piece of gold? I suspect not, or there would be a reality TV show with rednecks trawling the ocean in Alaska with magnets, searching for gold.
Even though I would love to see any non-human technology, I would probably bet that they're just going to find a bunch of dust, rocks and of course, human trash.
Definitely. But of course a metal detector coil can also look at simple change of inductance, hence responding to conductivity even with magnetic mu = 0.
I am not sure toughness has anything to do with ferromagnetic properties. But it seems like a bad idea anyways considering that very few materials are naturally ferromagnetic.
I get the "from outside our solar system" part, and it seems believable that sensors designed for missile tracking would get enough telemetry info to establish that.
But the "tougher than iron" part? Based just on how much material was lost during atmospheric entry, as reported by sensors not really designed for that purpose? That's a tough pill to swallow. It would be really interesting to hear more about how much this asteroid differed from others measured by the same equipment.
I have a dim memory that missile tracking systems pay close attention to how fast an object decelerates when it hits atmosphere, as part of distinguishing real warheads from decoys. Maybe you can use that data to estimate how fast a rock is eroding að it falls.
> The spelling lede (/ˈliːd/, from Early Modern English) is also used in American English, originally to avoid confusion with the printing press type formerly made from the metal lead or the related typographical term "leading".
It's actually more about the lead paragraph, not the leading news story. If you bury the leading news story, that would imply putting it on page 13 or something. Buring the leading paragraph is putting the most important information at the end of the article where fewer people are likely to encounter it.
>To “bury the lede” (sometimes spelled “bury the lead”) means to delay sharing the essential information in a story, and beginning with secondary details instead. The term originated in the news-writing world but is now applied widely in all fields of writing.
If anything "color" is correct, being the original Latin spelling. The Normans started misspelling it by the time they went about conquering the British Isles, but Middle English reflects both spellings.
On the other hand, English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, so both spellings might as well be equally correct.
On the third hand, they're both wrong if we want to get old school about it; no sense in catering to a bunch of French invaders when we have the perfectly good words "blee" and "hue".
