Video shows asteroid discoveries since 1980

Just in case I wasn't already in awe of the scientific progress made during my own lifetime, Lauren Submitterated (it's a verb now) this video showing the mind-blowing numbers of asteroids that have been discovered since 1980. Created by Scott Manley—and with some very lovely music, I might add—the video shows new discoveries in white, then changes their color to reflect position in relation to the inner solar system. Earth crossers are red. Earth approachers are yellow. All others are green.

Manley's included a lot of good information about what the patterns of where and when new asteroids appear in the video tell us about astronomy over over the last 30 years.

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Pip_R_Lagenta

Mother of God! I had no idea!
Amplifier

Go smackingly beautiful. Also reminds me how awesome that Trifonic album is.
Astragali

Wow… an impressive miasma of discovery. There’s also the highly disorientating effect when the video stops at the end, as the screen appears to start spinning the other way.
Anonymous

Woah, cool … but vaguely disturbing that Earth all but disappears in the clutter there at the end …

Incidentally, is the mass of green outboard from Mars essentially a new planet forming?
- Spaceman Dave
  
  The green objects are main belt asteroids. The main belt is thought to be a region where planets failed to form due to the gravitational influence of Jupiter. The total amount of mass of the main belt today is only about 5% the mass of the Moon. Keep in mind that those dots are vastly exaggerated in size. To scale, those dots should be about the size of the atoms in your monitor.
Anonymous

When I was a young teen ager or perhaps a slight pre-teen I was outside with some friends. This was probably 1980 to 1984 if I had to guess. That would make me between 10 and 14 years old. Anyways, we saw a large orange and black circle in the night sky. It was about the same size as a full moon. As we watched this we started to see a tail of other orange particles coming off of it. At first it appeared to be moving towards us but soon we could tell it was moving across the sky. We were just kids in awe with no fear. As the tail grew we started to get alarmed. The tail was so big that if you held your arms out full length, the tail was about 18″ between your hands. I decided to run in the house to get the adults so they could see it. I figured they would get the same amusement out of it that we were. I explained what we were looking at and they rushed out of the house. When they saw it, they freaked out in terror and of course that is when us kids got scared. It flew out of sight within 5 minutes and it was over. However, there was nothing on the news about it and after all these years, I still cannot find anything about it. Could it be that it was such a super close call that they just wont mention it?
Anonymous

I played that video game… It’s called Osmos.
sapere_aude

I saw this a week or two ago, and my first thought (after several moments of stunned silence) was: The Earth is doomed. With that many asteroids out there, many of which cross our orbit, one of them is bound to get us sooner or later. And, given the fact that we’ve only just recently discovered most of these, the chances of us identifying an Earth killer early enough for us to actually do anything about it are kinda slim. We’re lucky the human race has survived as long as it has.
- RobDubya
  
  To paraphrase Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer: the odds of any individual human dying during their lifetime as the result of a meteorite impact is approximately 700,000 to 1. That’s less likely than dying in a fireworks accident, about the same chance as dying on an amusement park ride, and significantly MORE likely than dying in a terrorist attack.
  - Anonymous
    
    @ RobDubya, which 5 people in the world have died from meteorite impacts in our lifetimes? (6.7 billion, divided by 2, divided by 700k = about 5 people.) I think the odds are much, much lower than 700k to 1.
  - sapere_aude
    
    While it is necessary and useful to be able to quantify risk, the method we currently use — expressing risk as a probability — can be extremely misleading, as Anon #23 so clearly points out above.
    
    A few years ago, a kid in my neighborhood — whose family I have known for most of my life — was killed in a fireworks accident. I’ve never personally known anyone who was killed by terrorists; but, according to the news, dozens of people are killed in terrorist attacks every year. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no human being has ever been killed by a meteor strike in all of recorded history.
    
    Yes, it’s absolutely true that, if you take the probability of a small asteroid or large meteor hitting the Earth in, say, the next 50 years, and multiply that probability by the number of people who would likely be killed by that asteroid/meteor strike, the resulting number is less than the number of people who will likely be killed in fireworks accidents over the next 50 years, yet far greater than the number of people who will likely be killed by terrorists. However, that does not imply that you or I are personally more likely to be killed in a fireworks accident than in a meteor strike. Nor does it imply that there will be more deaths from meteor strikes than from terrorist attacks over the next 50 years.
    
    When quantifying risk, we’ve got to be careful that we don’t leave a misleading impression. I can honestly say, without any self-contradiction, that it is extremely unlikely that you, or I, or anyone we know will be killed by a meteor impact; but that, over the extremely long term, asteroids/meteors pose a significant threat to human survival.
Spaceman Dave

There are some interesting patterns to the discovery rate that are noticeable in this video, especially during the 2000s when discoveries were more or less continuous year round. There’s a subtle “pulsing” of the discoveries that has a period of roughly 12 times per year. Many of these objects are very faint, and when the Moon is full it makes it harder to see them.

The other interesting thing to notice is that about the 6 o’clock position the discovery rate diminishes. This is a combination of two major factors. One is that this is in the same direction as the galactic center, and the large number of stars in that direction makes it harder to pick out asteroids. The second factor is that this position corresponds to late summer in the norther hemisphere of Earth. A lot of these discoveries were made in observatories in southern Arizona and New Mexico, which experience summer monsoons with greater average cloud cover than in the rest of the year. I know that some of the asteroid survey programs shut down during monsoon months because there just aren’t enough good clear nights, and it’s a good time to do maintenance and equipment upgrades.
- Anonymous
  
  Better than the amount of asteroids, the palaeontological record can give you an idea of how often they cause extinctions. The answer is sometimes, maybe enough to worry about, but not nearly enough that we’re on borrowed time.
InsertFingerHere

Had a Goatse moment near the end.

This reminds me of a scene in Pitch Black where the guy is in complete darkness, lights his torch, and sees he’s surrounded by death.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
- Spaceman Dave
  
  I just don’t get the fear people have over this, and I certainly don’t think that “ignorance is bliss.” Ignorance is just ugly ignorance. There is great beauty in the natural world, and in our developing understanding of it though science, and the asteroids are part of that. They teach us about gravitational dynamics, about the formation process that lead to our solar system and our Earth, about the impact processes that shaped the surfaces of the solar system and may have had a hand in the formation of life itself. They beckon us to venture out and explore them. Fragments of these bodies have landed on Earth (where we call them meteorites) and contain some of the oldest solidified material in the solar system. Almost all we know about the very earliest events in the solar system, tens of millions of years before the Earth was finished being born, we know because the asteroid belt is there conveniently sending bits of itself to us. Just look at the beautiful motion of the swarm of dots, with the innermost dots orbiting faster than the outermost ones just as Kepler tells us they should (just look at it!).
  
  Most of the asteroids are happily orbiting far from Earth never threatening us. Of those that possibly could (the NEAs) the surveys of the past 15 or so years have ruled out any major threats, and as we continue to discover more, we are likely to rule out the more minor threats, too. Being afraid of the asteroids is like being afraid of clouds because you might get hit by lightening.
Anonymous

WOW unbelievably beautiful!! How quickly we advanced in our knowledge of “near” space over thirty years!
@anon#4 – I do not believe it is a planet forming but I do think it possible the system is metamorphosing and it is highly likely that Earth as we know it may not survive the next stage of this transformation, of coursethat is possibly thousands of years away. That is an extreme amount of material in that asteroid band and it is erratic, at least in the short amount of time we have known of it. It could be that if we had the luxury of a video showing the movements of the band over 100,000,000 years or so it may show a pattern of evolvment. But we don’t have that…
drewand1200

I’m alarmingly relaxed at the moment…
Anonymous

You really have to remember that this isn’t to scale. If you were to actually see something like this in the night sky (assuming you were a couple AU off the elliptical), you’d have to increase their albedo and size orders of magnitude.

Now that we’re sentient and have the capability (maybe not the will) to achieve escape velocity, we can probably divert or break an Earth interceptor before it reaches us. If we see it.

If you really want scary, think about the Nemesis star some theorize comes through Sol every 26 million years, bringing with it all sorts of unmapped satellites and waves of extinctions on Earth. That’s in 20 million years, though, if it even exists.

Maybe you could even force a moon into orbit around it and ride it to the aphelion.
blackanvil

I’m amused by how you can see the Earth’s gravity (and that of the other planets to an extent) influencing the orbits of many of the NEO asteroids, which sort of zip in then meander off for the most part.

Yeah, most of these are tiny, but there’s still quite a lot of the NEOs, and it is kinda disturbing at times watching them get sucked in close (probably not even inside the orbit of the Moon, though) only to miss and wander off.
bassplayinben

You think this is crazy, wait until we really start figuring out the number of objects in the Kuiper Belt.
optuser

I was getting ready for my trip down THE ROAD, but Spaceman Dave’s comment about the relative size being the atoms of my computer screen make me feel better. Still, that red swarm is making some rough seas for the Tidy Bowl man.

In addition to the advances in astronomy, does the rate of discovery follow any other scientific patterns? What’s the one about computer power doubling?
- Spaceman Dave
  
  You mean Moore’s law? You can see its effect in one major area: the sudden increase in the discovery in the mid 1990s is due partly to the transition from the use of photographic plates to digital sensors on the telescopes (CCDs, like those found in digital cameras). The increase at this time is also due to a matter of funding. Congress mandated the Spaceguard program to discover potentially hazardous asteroids in response to the 1994 impact of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter.
pato pal ur

Trippy, mesmerizing, and educational. I loved it.
Anonymous

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WATCH THIS YOUTUBE VIDEO WHEN ON MUSHROOMS OR ACID. THANK YOU.
TimD

There’s a twitter feed of the near-misses: http://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks
Anonymous

Thanks Spaceman Dave, I appreciate you comments (you too, Anon #10 :) )

Jon (aka anon#4)