I didn't think you ever wanted to sleep again, so here's a video to help with that

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw&hd=1"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw&hd=1[/ame]

30 animated years of asteroid discovery... watch in 720p HD at the very least, and full screen it if you can. Quite impressive

 

Well, all those red dots are kinda popping in and out all over the place all the time... =P

 

Oh yeah, we're not in any severely serious danger... still, thats over half a million asteroids being tracked in that one image (the green ones are no danger at all.)

And yes, That was almost certainly a small planet at one time. The early gravity oscillations between joop and saturn as they settled into their modern day orbits did a lot by way of demolition.

 

Well it does both simultaneously, and for the same reason you mentioned... it pulls more than either mars or earth, and so while that dislodges more material, it also pulls more of it into itself, too. Without Joop we'd be a far more scarred place than we are.

 

Can't quite agree, though the principle is sound; you just need to remember that large bodies tend to 'lull' smaller ones into ever tightening orbits. If Joop is the one responsible for kicking an asteroid into a new orbit, unless that asteroid makes good with the infinitesimal chance of accidentally hitting another body on its way, it's going to loop ever closer to Joop until its end fate is essentially guaranteed... that it will impact with the aforementioned planet. We've seen it happen three times in just the last year, while we've yet to witness the same happening to mars or earth.

Also, the saturn-joop dynamic is pretty stable now... their inter-acting migrations occurred a long time ago along with the majority of asteroid kicks resulting from that.

Still, the same thing can occur here. A close enough pass with Earth could turn a joop-fate into an earth-fate, as is occurring with Apophis. Each loop it makes brings it closer to earth, so it's largely just a matter of time with that one.

 

Naw, that's definitely fair. We are kind of a small target for something that's only passing through... the ones that essentially 'live' in our orbit and are on loops with us are the most serious (albeit somewhat depleted) danger.

 

Pff, I dont give a[n] explicative about the current definition of planet. =)

Here's mine:

Planet. Noun: Any non-fusing body of mass that condenses into a sphere under the stress of its own gravity.

Doesn't have to be a perfect sphere (our own earth's equator bulges a bit, as most do.) nor does it matter if it ALSO happens to be a moon. It just needs to be not a sun, a solar dwarf (neutron, white, brown, whatever), or planetoid with lumpy things sticking out of it that are half as large as itself. Can be made of gas, ice, rock, whatever.

Nice and simple and includes earth, jupiter, ceres, and pluto along with luna and ganymede and titan and triton and others. =)

 

I still plan on taking a hiking vacation/retirement at Tau Ceti.