Rock Legends
The Asteroids and Their Discoverers
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The orbits of asteroids are controlled by the gravitational pull of the major planets, which pull them together in groups or disperse them from forbidden zones.
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What happens to asteroids in the future? Some will be flung from the solar system into the cold of interstellar space. Others will survive the evolution of the Sun though its red giant phase and be swallowed a...
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Asteroids are orbiting rocks. Meteors are small dust particles or rocks, which impact on the Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. In some cases astronomers have tracked the direct connections between asteroids...
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Celestial mechanics is the mathematics of the orbits of asteroids and has a reputation for mathematical difficulty, accuracy and foresight. But recent discoveries have shown just how chaotic the orbits of the ...
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Asteroids are undeveloped small planets or fragments of planets and constitute an astronomical rubbish heap of evidence about the past history of the solar system, just as an archaeological midden is evidence ...
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The first asteroids were new planets, found at the start of a new century, viewed as inspiring, newly discovered lands. The discoveries stretched astronomers to implement new techniques and new ways of analysi...
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Naming an asteroid is in some sense a way to possess it, even though asteroids are celestial objects far beyond any terrestrial control. The declaration of a name for an asteroid historically constituted a pub...
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In the twenty-first century, astronomers working with the most sensitive detectors and largest telescopes have developed big data sets from which they have unearthed faint, distant asteroids far beyond what we...
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The first asteroids were found by chance, but astronomers implemented systematic methods to discover more of them, deploying newly developed detector, information technology, radar and space techniques.
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Modern astronomers have set up controls to systematise data about asteroids and develop naming and cataloguing conventions.
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Most asteroids known orbit in the Main Belt, a gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. What is the gap? and why is it there?
Book
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In 1543, on his deathbed, the Polish cleric Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) published his idea that Earth orbited the Sun, not the other way around. Earth was a planet. It was thus like the other planets of th...
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Venus is the non-identical twin of Earth, the same size but very different in appearance. To the naked eye Venus is very bright. In a telescope Venus shows as a white globe. It is covered in white cloud. Any m...
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Conspiracy theories are about groups of people who are executing a coordinated secret plan to achieve some nefarious purpose, something important. On a scale of 1–100, where a conspiracy to achieve world domin...
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In January 2005, an electronic eye gazed on the fresh landscape of new land on a previously unexplored world. It saw a landscape that would, at first sight, have been familiar to many human eyes. The scenes th...
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The surface of the Moon is dead, a landscape that, after the tumultuous and violent changes of an earlier bombardment, now changes very little and very gradually indeed. By contrast, the landscapes of comets a...
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Buzz Aldrin’s words as he gazed at the lunar landscape for the first time were “Magnificent desolation!” Surely the same words could be used to describe the icy wastes of Antarctica and the sea ice of the Nort...
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Landscape (noun)