Monday, January 20, 2020

Where a fireball came from

A fireball over Kyoto in 2017 has been analyzed. Several sites got views of it, and they reconstructed its trajectory and think it came from "near-Earth asteroid 2003 YT1." As we saw with the Ryugu touchdown, asteroids can have lots of loose chunks, and I suppose that, something like comets though not as dramatic, bits can come off when they warm up in the Sun. Bits of me peel off when I spend too much time in Sun too.

It wasn't a huge chunk--they think only a few cm--but it's cool that they were able to track down where it probably came from. "The parent body 2003 YT1 could break up, and those resulting asteroids could hit the Earth in the next 10 million years or so, especially because 2003 YT1 has a dust production mechanism." (Dust production mechanism means stuff comes off it.)

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