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Steph (they/them)

3 weeks ago • •

Steph (they/them)
3 weeks ago • •

Love this as an opening for a paper. Love to study my sky vermins.

(The paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.20179)

#astronomy #astrodon

Screenshot from a scientific paper. "Called the vermins of the sky by astronomers for a long time owing to the trails they left on photographic plates (Seares 1930), the accidental observations of asteroids in large sky survey have seen a growing interest."

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

in reply to Steph (they/them)

Steph (they/them)

in reply to Steph (they/them) • 3 weeks ago • •

This is a good paper. And it has this absolute banger of an appendix.

Edit: this post is getting more attention than the one before it, so to clarify this is Carry et al. 2024, here is the paper link again: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.20179

#astrodon #astronomy

Screenshot of a paper:

Appendix A: Good bet, Mr Clarke!

"On Day 86 they were due to make their closest approach to any known asteroid, It had no name - merely the number 7794 [...] Through the high-powered telescope, they could see that the asteroid was very irregular, and turning slowly end over end. Sometimes it looked like a flattened sphere, sometimes it resembled a roughly shaped block; [...]" - Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 — A Space Odyssey

In the 1968 Arthur C. Clarke book, 2001 — A Space Odyssey, the author describes the observation of the asteroid 7794 from a flyby (which would be discovered only in 1996), predicting that this asteroid "looked like a flattened sphere”. Using the most recent data from FINK (version 2024.01, see Sect. 6, we found a value for the oblateness around 0.5, favouring the prediction made in the book. The parameter estimate has still a large uncertainty though, but given the residuals in the phase curve, we can infer that either the asteroid is irregular along its equator (a # b) or there could be an extra unmodelled activity.

#astronomy #Astrodon

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

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