“An infrared space telescope has spotted several very dark asteroids that have been lurking unseen near Earth’s orbit. Their obscurity and tilted orbits have kept them hidden from surveys designed to detect things that might hit our planet.
Called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the new NASA telescope launched on 14 December on a mission to map the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. It began its survey in mid-January.
In its first six weeks of observations, it has discovered 16 previously unknown asteroids with orbits close to Earth’s. Of these, 55 per cent reflect less than one-tenth of the sunlight that falls on them, which makes them difficult to spot with visible-light telescopes. One of these objects is as dark as fresh asphalt, reflecting less than 5 per cent of the light it receives.
Many of these dark asteroids have orbits that are steeply tilted relative to the plane in which all the planets and most asteroids orbit. This means telescopes surveying for asteroids may be missing many other objects with tilted orbits, because they spend most of their time looking in this plane.
Fortunately, the new objects are bright in infrared radiation, because they absorb a lot of sunlight and heat up. This makes them relatively easy for WISE to spot.”
Read more at New Scientist
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There is very little money put into research to discover asteroids that are a threat to our planet. Its also more alarming that the 3 known civilizations before us were all wiped out with a catalytic event. I find stuff like this fascinating yet alarming.
OMG OMG OMG we’re all gonna to die 0.0
…again -.-
Hmmmmmmmmmmm veeerrrrryyyyyy interesting indeed
omg omg omg we’re all going to die omg omg…
yer and i supose we’ll hit them in 2012
wat everything and everyone is forgetting is this
we will die in the end anyway when is not really that important
the most beautiful building is eventually rubble.
Yay NASA…
It’s been said that the amount of people looking for asteroids that could strike the earth would amount to the staff of a normal sized McDonald’s.
It’s not that it would matter that much currently though. We don’t really have a way to stop something from hitting us if we knew it was coming.
Of course that’s not the only thing we have to worry about. A solar flare 100x larger than any we’ve seen would probably kill most of us. No way of knowing if this has ever happened in the past either, since it wouldn’t leave any evidence or traces in history.
RichardWiseman@Twitter – the link led to gtlabs and a book called ‘Levitation; physics and psychology…’might be worth a glance by some. Didn’t know where else to put the message!