I've never seen one before, no one has, but I'm guessing it's a white hole.
NASA to Announce massive discovery
- Thread starter Teki187
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I've never seen one before, no one has, but I'm guessing it's a white hole.
Even amateur astronomers would pick up on it before we had 0.5 seconds left.
Soldato
Actually only a small proportion of the sky is scanned for incoming objects (around 5% if memory serves).
Of course, we would have more than 0.5 seconds to react (the object would likely spend a good few seconds travelling through the Earth's atmosphere, and we would certainly detect it before that), but to assume we would have months of warning is highly optimisitc.
Of course, the larger the object the more warning we would have, but in cosmic terms it wouldn't take a very large piece of rock to exact a near extinction level event upon us.
As a ballpark, say hours or days of warning, unless we were lucky enough to be observing that particular portion of sky. The 'near misses' we often hear about with predicted intercepts of several years are generally the *really huge* pieces of rock that impact our planet once every fifty million years or so.
It's not just about scanning the sky though. Objects make themselves obvious the closer they get.
Anything large enough to do us any serious harm would be noticed months in advance by amateur astronomers who notice an odd, bright object in the sky where there wasn't one before.
Anything large enough to do us any serious harm would be noticed months in advance by amateur astronomers who notice an odd, bright object in the sky where there wasn't one before.
So what is it?
I think we've experienced this period of time before
Soldato
Hey, wait a minute, I missed the discussion!
a white hole is a burst of energy from a singular point, like the big bang. maybe a block hole is 1 of 2 ends of a worm hole ,the other end being a 'white hole' . matter in, matter out.
so maybe there are multiple universes being made all the time.
so maybe there are multiple universes being made all the time.
Suspended
Never heard of him.......but where else would souls go, be too sodding crowded down here??
The truth, of course, is that Space is not expanding all the time as had been thought by small minded Astronomers, but that the Earth, all the Planets and Stars, and any other heavenly body, are the result of a Planet 10 million times the size of the Earth exploding and showering into the known Universe(not by us you understand, but by them,) and we are but a small piece of that planet, hurtling through space outwards from the initial explosion, thus the illusion of an expanding Universe in our eyes.
We are but a speck of dust in the real Universe.............
.....Either that or they have given the first franchise for MacDonald's on the Moon?!!
Soldato
.....Either that or they have given the first franchise for MacDonald's on the Moon?!!
I hope they pick my plot to build it on
Soldato
Relatively small objects which move rapidly through the sky are incredibly difficult to spot, unless they leave trails of dust particles (such as comets). There is nothing to suggest that the object would be 'bright'. We're talking days at most before the object is within range of even sophisticated telescopes that are not calibrated to scan for such objects.
Remember, an object on a collision course will also have a constant bearing (CBDR). Its movement is calculable only by its change in perceptable area (which takes extremely high-precision measurements to calculate, due to atmospheric interference), or the small motion relative to the rotation of the Earth around the sun.
Despite what Hollywood movies would have you believe, the chances of someone with a very high-powered telescope observing a near-invisible object at long range, and checking against known debris charts is miniscule. Remember, there are tens of thousands of pieces of space-debris in orbit, a large percentage of which are in geosynchronous orbit (and so would appear the same as a CBDR object). Asteroids generally move extremely fast, and even a large one would be days away at best before it appeared (visually) larger than a moderate sized piece of orbital debris.
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Relatively small objects pose no threat to us.
See above. An object big enough to do us any harm would be easily spotted.
Soldato
Sorry but that's wishful thinking. Consider a typical case:
An object of only 500m in diameter striking at high speed would be more than sufficient to cause a "nuclear winter" effect, kicking up enough dust to blot out the sun planet-wide, killing off 90%+ of plant life, and sending us back to the iron age at best.
Consider that a typical piece of geosynchronous debris (from the rocket-launch of a satellite) will be of the order 5m, and be around 20,000 Km above the Earth's surface.
Simple maths will tell you then that a 500m object would need to be at a distance of ~2M Km before it appears larger than a typical 5m piece of space-debris. Travelling at only 100,000 km/h (a sedate pace for an astrometric body) it would close this distance in ~20 hours.
So no - we wouldn't have months. Days at very best, unless the object was far, far larger than the 500m case described above. In which case we would be even more ******.
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Associate
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- 16 Oct 2005
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Agreed. As posted earlier, we are only tracking a small percentage of the objects floating around up there, hence the campaigns to pump more money into a better system for tracking these things. Also, didn't a largish asteroid pass within the radius of the moon orbit withing the last year or so? Astronomers only noticed it as it passed. So yeah, we wouldn't neccessarily have years/ months of warning.