Spinning through space: The astronomers watching the skies for asteroids
BBCSpinning through space: The astronomers watching the skies for asteroids 5 days ago Share Save Sue Nelson Share Save Getty Images Sue Nelson explores how asteroids can inform our understanding of the Earth's past – or threaten our future. "Scientifically there's a huge amount we can learn from asteroids," says Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queens University Belfast and a member of one of Nasa's sky surveys that searches and tracks Near Earth Objects. "Any asteroid we detect is generally a fragment of a much larger body that was formed at the birth of our Solar System" says Fitzsimmons. "YR4 is a rocky asteroid that's deficient in lighter elements such as carbon, which tells us that it probably came from the inner asteroid belt," says Fitzsimmons. "If you know more about the structure of these objects," says Fitzsimmons, "then you can calculate more accurately what happens when it hits the Earth's atmosphere.Most asteroids below 10km across are almost all either heavily fractured solid objects or rock piles – smaller fragments of asteroids grouped together mostly by gravity."
History of this topic
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