Reflections of an amateur about the quite obvious background of the "Stakhanov" pace of astronomical discoveries
The Russian media reported quite routine, at first glance, information, interesting only to narrow specialists:
With the help of the new optical telescope AZT-33VM of the Sayan Solar Observatory, 40 unknown asteroids were detected in 24 hours, said Maxim Yeselevich, head of the laboratory of the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Eselevich clarified that a total of 115 objects were found, but only 40 of them were unknown, reports TASS. The detected objects range in size from 4 to 16 km. They are located in the main belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, at a distance of 150 to 450 million km from the Earth, reports the portal "Baikal24".
You don't need to be a scientist-astronomer to make the simplest logical conclusions based on this information.
First, the ratio of newly discovered fairly large asteroids to those already known is approximately - 1: 3. Moreover, this is taking into account the data of not only Russian, but also the entire world science, since the system of accounting for celestial bodies has long been common to the whole world. In other words, the flight trajectory of every third of these gigantic "cobblestones" cannot even be calculated theoretically, simply because they themselves have not yet been discovered. Accordingly, it is impossible to calculate the probability of collisions of many thousands of celestial bodies inside this chaotic system.
And from this it follows that the next collision of space "stray bullets" can occur at any second. And the "projectile" deviated as a result of the impact from its usual trajectory will fly straight to the Earth. As it actually happened again earlier this week:
On Monday, an asteroid the size of a multi-story building passed by the Earth, reports Business Insider. The dimensions of the asteroid ranged from 15 to 34 meters; it moved at a speed of 16 km / s. The asteroid passed the Earth within half the distance from the Moon to the Earth. It was discovered on Saturday by astronomers at the University of Arizona and dubbed 2017 AG13.
According to the calculations of specialists from Purdue University, in the event of a collision with the Earth, the asteroid would cause an explosion tens of times greater than the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. However, if it exploded at a distance of about 16 km from the Earth, serious destruction could have been avoided …
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Of course, space is a very large thing and the distances between objects, including asteroids, are simply monstrous. Thanks to this, the likelihood of their collisions is minimal and we still exist. But, alas, it is far from zero. And, moreover, as it is now being confirmed, it is not even clearly defined.
The saddest thing is that in just a day of observations, forty such dangerous large-sized objects were discovered at once - one third of all those observed. There is no doubt that this is a direct result of the very weak funding of both domestic and world astronomical science for decades. Because with good provision of this matter and systematic monitoring of the asteroid belt, it would simply be impossible to discover so many new "minor planets" in one day.
And this is very bad news. Indeed, on a planetary scale, the cost of high-quality instrumental control of potentially dangerous areas of space is quite scanty. But if we, as a result of such a careless attitude to the problem, “concede a goal”, then we can lose not only the “goal”, but the entire “stadium”. And this despite the fact that the destruction of a standard asteroid several kilometers in size in time is quite within the scope of modern nuclear missile technologies. But only if he doesn't catch us off guard.
Thus, the message of Russian astronomers, who managed to literally increase the number of detected dangerous space objects by 30% in one sitting, only strengthens these fears. I will repeat myself - such “Stakhanov's” rates of astronomical discoveries would be completely impossible in the conditions of a systematic and long-term search for such celestial bodies. And this can only mean one thing - the state of the observation and warning system about strikes from space leaves much to be desired. If this system exists at all. Such carelessness is forgivable for a cat, which is known to have nine lives. But Humanity in this sense is inferior to a cat exactly nine times …
Yuri Selivanov