View Single Post
  #2  
Old February 24th 16, 05:28 PM posted to sci.astro
Yousuf Khan[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,692
Default Most near-Earth asteroids are destroyed by the Sun, long beforethey get to Earth

On 23/02/2016 5:00 PM, Steve Willner wrote:
In article ,
Yousuf Khan writes:
"A new study finds that most asteroids and comets are destroyed in a
drawn out, long hot fizzle, much farther from the Sun than previously
thought."

Mystery of disappearing asteroids solved | Astronomy.com
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2016/0...teroids-solved


The paper is in _Nature_ at
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture16934.html
but you will need a subscription or pay to read more than the
Abstract. I didn't find a preprint.

The new result implies that many asteroids, especially dark ones,
disintegrate at a few tens solar radii rather than at the much
smaller distances one might expect. Despite the press release, I
don't see anything about what fraction of asteroids disappear this
way versus the fraction destroyed by hitting a planet.


Doesn't it simply mean that any and all asteroids that gets this close
to the Sun, gets destroyed?

Yousuf Khan