If you ever watched The Empire Strikes Back and fantasized about being Han Solo as he piloted the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field in a risky attempt to outrun the Empire, well, I have great news for you: dream no more, because you’re doing it right now. According to NASA researcher Pastor Schober, a previously undetected asteroid is coming apart as it passes the Sun, shedding hundreds of fragments that Earth, our gigantic Millennium Falcon, is currently passing through.
I got dibs on Han; you can be Chewy.
As Shober explained in a paper recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, and further detailed in an essay in The Conversation, he dug through 235,271 recorded events collected by observatories across multiple continents. Buried deep within that wad of numbers was a tight cluster of 282 meteors, all moving in the same direction, as they came from the same source.
The Sun Destroyed an Asteroid, and the Debris Is Telling a Story
That source is most likely a small asteroid being slowly heated by the sun, since space rocks are really just clumps of dirt, a bit of rock, and gases held together by ice. Expose them to heat, and they start melting, sputtering, and breaking apart into their component pieces. When that happens, as a chunk of rock passes through the Earth’s atmosphere, it results in beautiful, brilliant streaks.
Meteor streams like this are cosmic breadcrumbs that point back to celestial objects we could see. They clue us in on hidden clusters of near-Earth asteroids that, if we catch them early enough, can help us better understand the lifecycles of these space rocks, and, you know, maybe help us figure out how to destroy them should one pose a significant threat to human life.
There doesn’t seem to be anything potentially cataclysmic on our celestial horizons just yet, but having a little extra knowledge on what exactly causes these things to splinter into several smaller chunks of harmless debris couldn’t hurt.
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