We Have Underestimated Our Sun’s Destructive Reach

We Have Underestimated Our Sun’s Destructive Reach http://bit.ly/1PRm3T4  


The Sun has enormous destructive power. Any objects that collide with the Sun, such as comets and asteroids, are immediately destroyed.But now we’re finding that the Sun has the ability to reach out and touch asteroids at a far greater distance than previously thought.

The proof of this came when a team at the University of Hawaii Institute of Astronomy was looking at Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) catalogued by the Catalina Sky Survey, and trying to understand what asteroids might be missing from that survey.

An asteroid is classified as an NEO when, at its closest point to the Sun, it is less than 1.3 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. We need to know where these objects are, how many of them there are, and how big they are. They’re a potential threat to spacecraft, and to Earth itself.The Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) detected over 9,000 NEOs in eight years. But asteroids are notoriously difficult to detect. They are tiny points of light, and they’re moving. 

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