Space rock Vesta promoted to ‘protoplanet’
Vesta, the second-largest object in our solar system's asteroid belt, is a protoplanet, according to research released Thursday. Scientists reviewed data from the Dawn spacecraft orbiting Vesta and concluded that Vesta is protoplanet that survived numerous collisions with other space rocks since it formed more than 4.5 billion years ago.
"Dawn’s mission at Vesta has been a spectacular success. It’s transformed Vesta from a fuzzy orb into a planetary body," said Carol Raymond, the deputy principal investigator for Dawn at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Becoming a protoplanet is an upgrade from Vesta’s previous designation as an asteroid or minor planet. It means Vesta’s structure shows it has a dense, layered body and orbits the sun, like the Earth and other rocky planets. Vesta didn’t quite make it to full-fledged planet, but Raymond said it's more like a planet than an asteroid.
“Vesta’s history appears to be more similar to rocky, terrestrial planets - Mars, Mercury and the Earth’s moon - than to its larger sibling, the dwarf planet Ceres,” Raymond said at a briefing announcing new research data on Vesta.
According to NASA, a large rocky body orbiting the sun is called an asteroid or minor planet. Much smaller particles in orbit about the sun are referred to as meteoroids. Protoplanets share more of the materials and structure of planets like Earth, Mercury and Mars, but something interrupted their development, and they never quite made it to planetary status.
Vesta is between Mars and Jupiter in our solar system’s main asteroid belt. It is about as long as Arizona: 359 by 348 by 285 miles (about 578 by 560 by 458 kilometers). There are about 440,000 known asteroids in the region, but scientists say there could be millions that haven’t been discovered. Most are very small.
Researchers also confirmed that Vesta is the “parent” of a common type of meteorite found on Earth. Called howardite-eucrite-diogenites, or HEDs, they make up about 6% of the meteorites that fall to Earth. Scientists think these meteorites come from a giant impact basin at Vesta’s South Pole called Rheasilvia. That area also is believed to be where small asteroids, called Vestoids, come from.
Images and data from Dawn are giving researchers details about the shape and composition of Vesta. They say it is covered with impact craters, steep slopes and large troughs.
“Vesta has a concentration of mass at its center proving that it is a differentiated body with an iron core, a silicate mantle and a less dense basaltic crust, the same as Mercury and Mars, the Earth and the moon,” Raymond said.
Dawn also has given scientists a much better look at the Rheasilvia basin. Data show that it’s a nearly circular impact basin about 310 miles (500 kilometers) in diameter.
“Vesta is special because it survived the intense collisional environment of the main asteroid belt for billions of years allowing us to interrogate a key witness to the events at the very beginning of the solar system,” Raymond added. “We believe Vesta is the only intact member of a family of similar bodies that have since perished.”
Earlier research from Dawn gave the most detailed information to date about the surface temperature of any asteroid visited by a spacecraft. Researchers reported earlier that data show Vesta’s temperatures range from minus-10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-23 degrees Celsius) in its sunny spots to minus-150 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-100 degrees Celsius) in the shadows.
The Dawn space probe, carrying a visible light camera, a visible and infrared mapping spectrometer, and a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 27, 2007. After it finishes exploring Vesta, it will travel to the dwarf planet Ceres in February 2015.
Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, is about the size of Texas(606 by 565 miles, or 975 by 909 kilometers). Astronomers think water ice may be buried under Ceres' crust and estimate that if Ceres is composed of 25% water, it may have more water than all the fresh water on Earth. But if it does have all that water, it’s likely to be frozen in Ceres’ mantle.
@CNNLightYears on Twitter
People in Orbit
Expedition 36 Commander
Expedition 36 Flight Engineer
Expedition 36 Flight Engineer
Contributors
-
Elizabeth Landau
Writer/Producer -
Sophia Dengo
Senior Designer
I must thnkx for that moment you earn in some recoverable format this kind of blogpost. I really hope the same best product of your stuff after as well. Truly your current creative composing skill features motivated us to start out my own, personal weblog currently. In truth the blogging will be dispersing the chicken wings rapidly. Your current post can be a fine demonstration of that. Criminal Law Defense Lawyer http://jaymichel.com/?p=16
"And only I am 'scaped to tell the tale." Shakespeare (I think) If the rock could only speak; It could have been part of West Texas or New Rochelle.
The last Protoplanet standing.
Oh that's cool. The U.S has never lost a war when donkeys were in use. True story.
The CNN announcers revealed their ignorance by not acknowledging that the Earth is also an oblate spheroid.
Great to see so many people turning every article into a political debate or opportunity to slur a candidate. The bottom of the barrel pretending to have integirty and intelligence. American at its best!
WE ARE DOOMED.
@#$%%! Fanatics; Fascists & Communists & Islamic Fundamentalists & all the rest. Wish we could send all fanatics to Vesta & let them fight over it. Then the rest of us could get on with trying to get along with each other.
I want Andrew to give us another space lesson! He's my hero! The very first super hero named after a-whole-lot-of-Wikipedia-crap-that-no-one-really-cares-about powers.
It's not wikipedia crap, I'm a physics major, it's 'a whole lot of coursework crap'.
NewsFlash – scientists have decided to re-categorize a rock in space, which means that the rock is evolving!
This is news?
But New Horizons is a cool program, make no mistake.
Vesta does change for long periods of time, but it is not evolving. Also, this mission is the Dawn mission. New Horizons is on its way to Pluto.
EVERYBODY NEEDS TO SO FIGHTING YO! WHO CARES IF THE EARTHS ORBIT IS AN OVAL OR IF THE ASTEROID IS TO SMALL!!!!!!! WORLD PEACE
Once Joe Biden called it a protoplanet, they had no choice. He apologized later.
Now that's funny, right t'ere.
Mayby Newt Gingrench will want to bulid a colony there as well.
2012 the world wIll be end.
What makes you think that?
money is the king. babe
It's an interesting find, but when they say it's 4.5 billion years old I have to be skeptical. That's just all based on theory and has yet to be proven.
That is an ignorant comment, betraying a lack of understanding of the word "theory" when used in a scientific context. Also, science is NOT about "proving" things, but finding explanations for observations.
so basically u called him a moron and proved no basis for it. good job. he was right, they have no idea how old it is by just simply flying a probe around it.
Dan, we have very good reasons to understand the age of the solar system, consistant results tend to indicate something to scientists.
Sad to see so many ignorant people here. I would think that the Belief Blog is more their speed.
Luder: It's CNN, what do you expect?
Andrew: What makes you think its been with the solar system since its inception? Duhh
Dan: Right on.
Jim, because the nearest solar system is 4 lightyears away, and is gravitationally locked in that solar system. Space in between solar systems is pretty much void of anything. Getting a rock to enter our solar system from a minimum of 4 lightyears away is somewhat like shooting a bow and arrow from miles away trying to hit an object the size of a pin.
And that's pretending there's an easy mechanism to send a rock here, but again, rocks are gravitationally bound in their respective solar systems, so I don't even understand how our solar system would collect rocks from outside.
For your edification, they say it's that old because we have numerous things called "meteors", which are chunks of rocks that come crashing down towards earth. Most burn up on entry, but some make it all the way down to the ground and these are called 'meteorites'. Now, these 'meteorites' likely came from our solar system, because there's very slim chance that rocks came from other solar systems when the nearest solar system to us is 4 lightyears away. So, we look at meteorites, and we can determine their age, and thus determine how long ago the meteorites (and thus, the solar system) formed.
What ends up happening is that we have this thing called 'radiometric dating'. Many creationists like to pretend that we only have carbon dating, but that's simply not true, and with meteorites we normally will use isochron dating (which removes risk of 'contamination') and lead-lead or uranium-lead dating (or some form of dating with long half-lives)
As it happens, we've done this for many, many different meteorites and all find that to within a first order approximation, the age is around 4 billion years old.
But it gets better than that! We also know that the sun burns hydrogen at a certain rate, and we know that while it is a 3rd generation star, the majority of the star was still hydrogen when it first formed. We can then extrapolate from that the approximate age of the sun, which, surprise surprise, is also 4 billion years old. (We actually have other methods of determining the age of the sun, some pertaining to 'seismic' activity in the sun, but I'm far less well versed on those methods so I'm sticking to easy to grasp stuff)
There is, also, methods in general like the uranium 235 to uranium 238 ratio, because it's assumed that in a supernova both substances would have been produced in roughly the same amount, but of course they decay at very different rates. So we can measure the relative abundance of U-235 to U-238 to get an approximate time-frame on the super nova that sparked our solar system, which tends to come in on the order of around 5 billion years.
Scientists really do have a lot of methdods for dating the solar system.
Ah, like music to my ears. Thanks for articulating that so well. You should have also explained the difference between a theory and a hypothesis. Seams the word theory has taken a such a beating that it's even listed in the oxford dictionary as how it's used incorrectly, since it's done so often.
Yes and the world is flat and here be monsters. I'll take 4.5 billion years over that any day.
I think they mean that the asteroid is at least as old as the Earth. Scientists believe the Earth, Sun and the planets are about the same age having coalesced out of a primordial disc of nebular hydrogen mixed with the elemental detritus from long dead stars throughout the galaxy.. No one can know how long that process took but I tend to think it took a very long time as we humans measure it. Vesta is probably old almost beyond human imagination.
Debris from Vesta, which is responsible for 1 out of 20 meteorites that find their way to Earth, has been radiometric dated to 4.5 billions years ago. That is a fact, regardless whether you believe it or not.
Im not impressed I want Pluto back.
How dumb can these scientist be. They removed Pluto which had a body larger than any of these here and now they're saying that these smaller than Pluto asteroids are almost planets. What a bunch of idiots.
There's dozens if not hundreds of objects of the same size as Pluto, if not larger, in the same region. It's called the "Kuiper Belt." There's really no sound reason for it to be called a planet when those other hundreds of objects aren't. They weren't aware of the many, many other Kuiper Belt objects when the tiny little rock known as Pluto was discovered.
If it makes you feel any better, they don't really care what we call them.
I agree i want Pluto back
"Plu-to-ca! Plu-to-ca!"
Pluto is still there. When the asteroid Ceres was originally discovered, it was classified as a planet too until they found more in the same orbit and realized it was the asteroid belt and demoted Ceres.
Soo, that crater at the south pole is almost as big as the entire thing... that's some big ass&ole
When you wish upon a star, makes no difference what you are,.... you just are !
"When you wish upon a protoplanet.....makes no difference......"
Nah. doesn't work.
I know what this is all about. This is an effort by the Astronomy World Council to diffuse rage caused by the demotion of Pluto to a less-than-planet status. Well, it's not going to work. We know what they are up to, and we won't stand for it.
It's either Pluto is a planet or nothing! We will not be bought off by some 'proto' planet! I am so offended!
I totally agree.
You actually mean the International Astronomical Union and Pluto's demotion was done democratically. Get your facts straight. Pluto is a dwarf planet.
Did anyone catch that the orbits of the planets were depicted as circles in the graphic instead of ellipses? Now people will start to believe that the planets orbit around the sun in circles because they saw it on CNN.
Look into the percentages; percentage-wise the orbits of all the planets except Mercury and Pluto are actually VERY close to being circles.
Don't believe everything they taught you in school. 😉 The orbit of the Earth varies by a couple of million miles from perigee to apogee; *percentage*-wise that's practically a circle.
Let's see. Two million divided by ninety-three million (as I recall) equals 2.1505376344086021505376344086022 %. That looks like a big number to me. And it has a lot of 8's and 6's in it.
0.021505376344086 is the answer to 2 million divided by 93 million. A VERY small number. I think you forgot to put the decimal in the right place.
Comments like that are just lame! What did you expect? Do you think people would even care? The only reason you said anything is to make yourself look better...guess what, it backfired!
But an ellipse when viewed at certain angles can be circles...
You mean a circle when viewed at an angle looks like an ellipse.
An ellipse looks like, and is in fact, a circle if the foci are coincident.
Take a closer look: Mars, Ceres and Vesta are in elliptical orbits. The Sun is not at the center of these orbits, meaning that the Sun is at a focus of an ellipse. They appear circular because their eccentricities are small relative to a highly elliptical orbit, such as many comets.
Also, the Earth does not have a "perigee" and "apogee"; that implies that Earth orbits itself. Earth has a "perihelion" and an "aphelion".
It is good that Vesta has been promoted, but it should be a dwarf planet. "Proto-planet" means nothing except to confuse us further.
Why is it that when it's done by business and it doesn't work out, it's the free market working, but when government tries something, it's waste?
DOESN'T ANY ONE HAVE AN INTELLIGENT THING TO SAY ANY MORE?????
While it's nice to learn more about our solar system through private funding, we're wasting ever dime we give to NASA and I don't care what those people find or figure out. We're never going to get off of this planet because there is nowhere within at least a million lifetimes for us to go. Nothing can be done about anything that comes from space and lands on Earth, whether it be rocks or aliens. We aren't going to be harvesting diamonds from the moon or digging for oil on mars so get it out of your heads. Not one penny that was ever spent on NASA has done this country or this planet any good. It's time to stop the madness.
While it's nice to learn more about wooly mammoths and sabertooths, we're wasting every bit of meat and fur we give to those cave artists and I don't care what those people find or figure out. We're never going to get out of this cave or this valley because there is nowhere within at least a million lifetimes for us to go. Nothing can be done about anything that comes from the outside or from the seas. We aren't going to be hunting mammoths beyond the mountains or sail across the seas. Not one piece of meat that was ever spent on the cave artists and dreamers has done this tribe any good. It's time to stop the madness and get back into your cave.
there's a big difference between miles and light years. while you're being a smartass, why don't you educate the world on how to propel human beings faster than the speed of light, or explain where we will harvest the energy to power a wormhole big enough to fit a human.
yeah. you can't. because it isn't possible. because there are things called laws of physics.
next...
Here are a few things developed from NASA:
Invisible Braces, Scratch-Resistant Lenses, Memory Foam, Ear Thermometer, Shoe Insoles, Long-distance Telecommunications, Adjustable Smoke Detectors, Safety Grooving (In Roads) , Cordless Tools, Water Filters.
Just a few things you might use. And this is not including the 6300 patents they have filed. And this is not including the enormous amount of work they have done with airplanes and spacecraft, not to mention SATELLITES. We use though every day. NASA has been one of the more successful gov agencies and its a shame we are letting it die. Figure out some facts before spouting your nonsense
Privately funded researchers and corporations would have eventually developed every bit of that at a fraction of what was actually paid. Necessity is the mother of invention. Not NASA.
alright Mr butch... lemme list some things for you. you are ignorant. this is what NASA has "invented" just to name a few.
The hand-held vacuum cleaner, Firefighter breathing apparatus, Safer runways, carbon fiber (used in everything), Pill transmitters (for the medical community which measures BP etc), Teflon fiberglass (many big buildings use it, if you actually "have" a job NASA has helped kept the building stable above your head so you don't die...), storm warning systems, the practice to protect timeless art, Car crash technology, Plane wing-tips (which add lift extending range/reducing fuel consumption), Freeze-dried meals, oh and considering you think NASA is pointless how about this. Got kids? well they developed Baby food, Heart surgery (the lasers were developed by NASA, Life support for patients, Artificial limbs, Improved air quality, Satellite television....
so now Mr butch... who is ignorant... maybe you should learn to read more instead of staying indoors thinking you know everything...
cool story bro. credit to Wikipedia on that post. doesn't change the fact that the private sector would have developed most, if not all of that stuff eventually, and at hundredths of what we actually paid. how the hell did babies ever make it in this world without nasa's baby food?!?! oh yeah. they drank milk and ate real food. keep drinkin' the kool-aid, man.
😉
Well, warping space/time would satisfy all practical and life support problems related to superluminous travel but it would require about as much energy as all of the matter in Jupiter
Using the sun and other stars to power the missions? Well...
We do it for fun, dude.
Someone's been drinking the Republican kool-aid...
Hey Butch...would you mind defining "eventually" for us. I'm sure eventually the private sector will figure out a way to keep old people out of the streets when they're no longer able to work, but they ain't gonna do it soon. There was no private effort to go to space until visionaries gained public funding to make it a possibility. No company would ever say "boy, I bet our business could be done more efficiently if we just invest a couple of trillion dollars over 50 years to get to the point that we can have a global positioning system that lets us map where our trucks and ships are", and nobody was sitting there with the same idea and the ability to gain investor financing to do the same thing and then lease the system out. While some of the materials science would have likely been eventually done by companies, there would have also been no guarantee that those patents would be held by American ones, and there would be no guarantee of time lines. Modern corporations have proven that once they reach maturity, the stop innovating and start trading off their R&D for efficiency in the name of preserving their "core businesses". Raw free market economics creates businesses that incur just enough risk (and thus do just enough work) to create just enough profit to keep their shareholders from getting upset. If the type of innovation created by NASA was the hallmark of private industry, we'd have cars that get 100mpg on the road right now.
Maybe not in this day and age! Galileo was locked up for saying the earth revolved around the sun! To say it's impossible just shows how narrow minded you are!
@Butch,
While your waiting for private companies to invest in the space program, in the mean time the soviet union has created a monopoly in space, including offensive nuclear attack weapons. That and maybe they've already blown up the US as their first strike weapons have come down while we lacked the satellites to tell us they were bombing us.
Where the hell were you during history class? Have you forgotten about the Soviet Union? Do you not remember the Cold War?
While everybody is so busy listing all the tangible benefits from NASA what about good old knowledge for knowledge's sake? Isn't anybody interested in just learning more about the universe we live in, even if it never results in growing a better potato?
Butch:
Hate to burst your bubble but space exploration has given us teflon, advanced ceramics, extremely precise ball bearings, sophisticated computer technology, food processing and storage progress, improved fire fighting capability, miniaturization of electronics, mylar and other plastics....Physics, medicine, metal alloys, engineering. imaging technology, etc. You really should do some research before making such blanket statements.
I don't know what plant you hail from but space science has made improvements in many things that everyday earthlings take for granted. The list goes on and on and many, if not all, of these technological advances would never have been possible without the space program in place.,
Your right about necessity. Theses objects were needed for space travel. And without that push back in the 60s who knows how long these products would have taken to be made. There is of course waste, but this agency it is actually producing products that help everyone. I would much rather have NASA around then many other departments in our government.
lol...you ask that in here? All these forums do is serve the clueless morons who bash the US.
Ya want something intelligent from a human? Hey, we're barely 5 million years out of the trees. Ya can't expect miracles. ;op
Now if we could just figure out how to kick Ceres into a collision course with Mars, we could dump a lot of water (and heat) onto the planet. Might be interesting to see if that could make Mars more habitable.
Would be impractical, expensive, and likely dangerous. Don't count on it!
Impractical? Expensive? Likely dangerous? Why...my dear boy, that's exactly -why- we should do it! For science!
Could always get the Mythbusters to try it.
There's unimaginably huge profits over the LONG run. We literally need to invest hundreds of billions in order to make hundreds of trillions.
Problem is – we'll *die* as a race if we don't. Don't believe me? Sit down and think about it. No really – sit down and really *think* about it.
it doesn't have a magnetic field. no magnetic field, no habitable.
Well it is believed that it used to have a magnetic field. So who knows maybe adding some mass and energy could get it started again.
Solar Shielding
Getting ready to start prospecting for resources in that area... good time to start properly charting and classifying the terrain. Personally I am all for the "demotion" of Pluto if it was warranted to offer it a proper delineation. When we first blasted off into space we had very prmitive ideas of the objects were were (and are still) going to come across.
Here's a simple formula for separating asteroids from dwarf planets and protoplanets. If an object has enough gravity to force it into a spherical shape, it can be some kind of ...planet. If it doesn't, and it looks more like a potato, it is an asteroid. By this measurement, Ceres is a protoplanet or a dwarf planet. Vesta is an asteroid. Sorry Vesta, you've been demoted.
Vesta is fairly round and not anything like a "potato" asteroid. I think that the proto-planet status is correct.
I'm sure Bush will send troops out there, just like he sent them to Iraq for no reason...!!
*Boggle*
Got any timely Vietnam jokes for us?
Bush: the first outer-space President!!
Hmm, Prez Obama sends troops to Darfur and the Left fringe couldn't care less, but Angry German kid feels compelled to W-bash in spite of no rellevance. At all.
How pathetic! Morons always seem to find their way in!
Mmmm one of these asteroids is the size of Texas, now that something interesting. lol
Guess some people need a little more technical education. A oblate spheroid is the opposite of a prolate spheroid (read that as a football)
Dear Scientists,
Ever since you tried to "demote" Pluto from planet status, we pretty much have all started ignoring your silliness. But since you don't seem to care, and are more interested in writing scientific papers no one will read, and patting each other on the back, please feel free to continue with your absurdities.
Sincerely,
The remainder of the world, who will continue calling Pluto a planet
Your comment is boring to anyone who actually thinks...
That computer you are using: invented by scientists.
The internet this is hosted on: invented by scientists.
internet was invented by al gore.
There's dozens if not hundreds of objects of the same size as Pluto or larger; it's called the "Kuiper Belt." So by your logic, *all* of those objects should be called "planets" and should have names that everyone should memorize. Pluto's not special in any way compared to all those other Kuiper Belt objects.
They weren't aware of them when Pluto was first discovered.
This is all nonsense. The Earth is flat and the center of the universe. All these commets, planets, including the Sun orbit the earth. Evolution is heretical. Gay marriage is evil. Obama is the devil.
I hope you're kidding. I really do, because I had hoped people like you were close to extinct.
Hey, don't underestimate these people. They are tenacious and quite numerous among us. I'm surrounded by these kinds of folks deep in the mountains where I live. I've learned long ago not to tangle with or debate these people. You cannot sway them because their psychological conditioning stemming from religious indoctrination make them unable to think rationally. It is pervasive anong most american christian folks. As for their leadership, I learned it's better not to dive into the debate pit with them because that's really all they want. To be raised up to the level of the scientist by pulling true scientists into their debate trap. That's why scientists are better off just ignoring these people.
...and Allah is is a pedophile!
But guys gives better head. It's a historical fact.
Alright. Now they are just making up names for things to justify getting paid. An asteroid is an asteroid. Maybe since they call Pluto a "dwarf planet" they should just call this a "bigassasteroid".
Apparently you need to retake 7th grade science. Sorry to hear that.
It's admittedly a publicity gimmick but that's a large part of the job. 😉 'Ya gotta have money 'ta make money.
Heh! Good one! I like that! I wouldn't mind if they renamed Jupiter...'Biggaasssplanet'. Everyone would know we're talking about a planet instead of some old dried up roman god.
I can't wait to see what the Tony Orlando probe finds...
eeeewww.. I sure don't!
Can't launch the Orlando probe. It would discover all those yellow ribbons tied around those astrorocks. How would the scientists explain it?
And Pluto was tossed aside just like that.
Like what?
Just like that! Kicked to the curb.
I feel sorry for Pluto. Is that strange?
The thing is that there's actually dozens if not hundreds of objects of the same size or larger in that same area. It's called the "Kuiper Belt." They just weren't aware of that when Pluto was first discovered.
There's not much they're aware of.
Tomorrow's Headline: Pluto files discrimination lawsuit
Tomorrows headline: Obammer profits off gay planet rights.
lol. Let there be anarchy in the universe. Tea-planets unite.
I guess this would be Obama's war on the planets and asteroids!
But but but, he got the Nobel Peace prize for peace...
Panty raid–your an idot
What about the idea that there used to be once a planet that was within the asteroid belt, so after some terrible collision billions and billions ago, that caused the asteroid belt as we know it, and as for a couple of planet looking asteroids, they tried to reform as a planet but did not collect enought heat and spin to form, so when that was lost, you see those 2 proto-planet like objects we see today? did that ever ring a bell into your idiotic minds? simply mind boggling really...
That particular area of space between Mars and Jupiter is not a good piece of real estate if your in the planet forming business. Jupiter tends to perturb orbits with its large mass and keeps things bumping each other. So most likely a planet never formed in this region, maybe several protoplanets but some became moons of Jupiter(which has a lot of them) and others became pinballs for the inner planets.
A number of studies support the fact that the tidal forces of Jupiter and other planets kept the asteroid belt from forming a planet in the first place. We see this in other solar systems. No need for an exploding planet.
Run on sentence. Totally mind boggling.
Pssst – Good writers don't actually *care* if a sentence is a "run-on" sentence or not. That's just English teachers talking – they're using an old model which is essentially intended to teach "business English." Business English may be a good talent to have but it's not required anywhere outside of, uhm – business.
And I thought good grammar, spelling, and punctuation was useful for effective communication...I learn something new every day! (sarcasm implied)
What about these 2 idiots on the video! Jeez don't they have real nerds for GOD sakes.
I suppose that it does not have enough gravity to hold onto anything that hits it which means it is being slowly sandpapered away?
Wait... what? "slowly sandpapered away"? You do know there's no weather or atmosphere in space, right? Vesta has plenty of gravity, even enough to crush and form itself into a roughly spherical shape. It's not going anywhere.
It has more than enough gravity to keep debris (with a low enough energy) in orbit around Vesta. After all, the satellite watching Vesta is in orbit around it. We've seen other meteoriods wtih smaller orbiting rocks.
Promted, eh? You buttkisser asteriod, you!
Pluto fans are offended.
Agreed. Definately unfair to lay Pluto off, then hire this Vesta. REHIRE PLUTO!!
Vesta works for cheap.
Pluto was full time, Vesta is a seaonal temp. Seems like an elegant solution to our Q1 head-count reduction metric.
I'm glad kids these days are getting smarter. We only had to memorize 9 planets. These days you need a program to keep up with all the system players.
Let's latch onto the bugger and bring it in to crash into the moon. Then we'll have plenty of water to base ourselves there.
Uhhhhhh yeah ..... because purposely crashing a proto-planet into our moon isn't an insanely stupid idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh wait .....
How about we crash it into earth so all the rich elite can hide in underground bunkers for decades after the hit?
The wealthy elite will like this idea because it will cut down welfare and other government services. No more taxes. However, with no more slaves, the elite will need to bear many slave children to work their factories for them so they can still make profits for themselves.
I'm talking about underground golf courses here people!
Ho w about we crash it into earth so all the rich elite can hide in underground bunkers for decades after the hit?
Th e wealthy elite will like this idea because it will cut down welfare and other government services. No more taxes. However, with no more slaves, the elite will need to bear many slave children to work their factories for them so they can still make profits for themsel ves.
I'm talking about underground golf courses here people!
How about we convince the wealthy elite the protoplanet is on its way. When they scramble to their luxury underground bunker we slap a giant padlock on it and throw away the key. Problem solved.
As usual, astronomers at the Sarah Palin Galactic Observatory / Bait Shop are way ahead of the other researchers with their findings. They have concluded that this space rock is only 6,000 years old and that the baby jesus planted it their just to mess with everybody's heads.
Jesus seems to be everywhere.
you are
No, it was the devil who planted fossils and s hit to make us confused and lose faith.
It's really that simple, ask any christian.
Ask any christian? LOL! Why not ask a scientist who would actually has a clue about what they are talking about instead of that christian make believe crap?
There should be fossils to have oil (hence the name fossil fuels). Having fossils means that life should have existed on this surface at some point of time (very unlikely).
May the Schwartz be with you!
Vestivus,... For the Rest of Us!!
I'll get the pole out of the crawl space!
AW, it is so cute.
"...minus-150 degrees Fahrenheit..." Well scratch that baby off my bucket list....
Maybe they'll find Oil!!