How Much is an Asteroid Worth? Not as Much as You Think (or a Lot More)

This article was originally posted on Inverse. By Jacqueline Ronson ost of the time, people imagine the Earth as basically self-contained. It's a discrete planet, orbiting around the sun along with the other planets in an ordered system. But the more astronomers look to the skies, the more we learn about the enormous quantity and variety of space junk that shares this space with us -- and collisions are an unavoidable conclusion. Pluto was demoted from planet to dwarf planet because scientists started noticing a lot of space rocks that looked more like pluto than Earth or Jupiter -- there may be dozens or even hundreds of similar dwarf planets out there, waiting to be found. On top of that, there are half a million known asteroids, mostly located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists have identified 4,000 comets, but there could be a hundred billion more, hiding unseen in the Oort cloud. The history of Earth is the history of collisions. Scientists suspect that all of the water on Earth may have traveled here by asteroid or comet, since in its early history the planet would have been too hot, with an atmosphere too thin, to contain H2O. Today we see evidence of space junk in regular meteor showers -- pieces of stardust set on fire in a violent collision with the atmosphere. This meteorite will go up for auction later this month. Most of those meteors will break apart on entry, dissolving into dust. Scientists estimate that 10-40 tons of stardust enter our ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news