We’ve got action:
An asteroid with a diameter of 30m passed close but harmlessly by Earth, astronomers said.
The hurtling rock passed about 42,640km above the southern Atlantic Ocean at 22h08 GMT on Thursday.
It was the closest recorded encounter between Earth and an asteroid, said Steven Chesley, an astronomer at National Aeronautical Space Administration’s (Nasa) Jet Propulsion Laboratory who works on a program looking for such objects.
Such encounters, however, are actually believed to occur at the rate of one every two years and have simply not been detected, he said.
I like how the first sentence, similarly reported in the AP story, points out that the asteroid passed “harmlessly” by the earth. Let’s see here: if it misses the earth, there’s not much left nearby for it to harm, is there?
Elsewhere, there’s planetary controversy. When I was in grade school, the powers that be made out the composition of our solar system to be a cut and dried matter. There’s nine planets.
Not so fast. According to Space.com, scientists are just now getting around to defining what a “planet” is. As a result, they may end up declassifying Pluto as a planet, or they may add new planets. The debate is stirring up deep emotions:
“Either Pluto is not a planet, or many other things are planets,” Brown said today. “Which is a better choice? I want my planets to be more special, not less special, so I favor Pluto not being a planet. Emotionally, though, I have to admit that I have grown up thinking Pluto this special odd-ball planet at the edge of the solar system. While I now know scientifically that Pluto is less special, it’s still hard to let go.”
This fight could get ugly.