Talk:Asteroid

Contents

1 Trojans 2 Earth-Asteroid collisions 3 Asteroid naming conventions 4 Photo 5 Quaoar 6 Number of asteroids 7 Definition 8 About asteroid stub articles 9 When did they figure out it was a belt? 10 Link suggestions 11 French article, please merge 12 References 13 Wikipedia-specific self-references 14 Updating asteroid information

Trojans

There also Mars Trojans

And there is even an Earth "trojan." Discovered just recently, named Cruithne. I think that the term "Trojan" only applies to Jupiter's L5 and L4 asteroids, though, so check that before adding it to the entry.

As I understand it, a Trojan must be in [Langrangian point], but Cruithne is not, or is it? Also found some references to Mars Trojans in the internet. See, for a list of Trojans:

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/Trojans.html

joao

Earth-Asteroid collisions

How about the possibility of a collision of an asteroid with the Earth? User:Ed Poor

That would probably be a bad idea. :-O --maveric149

Asteroid naming conventions

I am rethinking my previous comments in support of naming asteroids using just the most common name first and then sorting out naming conflicts later. As it is, many articles and redirects will be directed to the most common name if an article is made with that name. Then when the inevitable renaming comes, all those links will be either broken or linked to the wrong article - what an unnecessary mess. How about we establish some kind of naming convention for asteroids? I suggest either following the type of naming convention found in the planets articles (e.g. Eros (asteroid)) or we use catalogue numbers (e.g. 433 Eros). I personally prefer using the second method since it is more precise and easier to link to in another article. Then the Eros article can be about the god - which makes sense, since all other uses of the word "Eros" are derived from the name of the god. A couple of links at the bottom of that article can then be added to the other uses of the word. Any other suggestions? --maveric149

I'm not wedded to any particular method, but your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. As long as the "common name" articles either disambiguate or redirect directly to the fancy technical name, there shouldn't be a problem; it'll still be easy to link to asteroids without having to always look up the technical name for [[433 Eros|Eros]]ing. Bryan Derksen

I am convinced that the number preceeding the name of an asteroid needs to be between parentheses. This is the naming convention in the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names by Lutz D. Schmadel and on the website of the Minor Planet Center (http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Bright/2003/00021.html). Does anyone have information that proves the contrary ? If not, this should be changed, but I am not active on the English wikipedia. - Tom. 81.240.23.198 18:03, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

You are quite right, the formal naming convention does require the parentheses. Dropping them lightens the text (they are kept for asteroids numbered but unnamed, because otherwise the name doesn't parse correctly). I have nothing against retrofitting them in, but the task would be immense.

Urhixidur 18:31, 2005 Feb 27 (UTC)

Photo

Which asteroid is the picture of? --rmhermen

Please give the photograph a proper label, or delete it. Sheesh. —Steven G. Johnson

Quaoar

If Quaoar is a minor planet (in the Kuiper Belt), shouldn't it be listed above Ceres in the table of largest asteroids? -- hike395 04:37 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Its all semantics, some say Quaoar is a planet, others say its a planetesimal, others say its a comet core, others say its a Kuiper belt object, and others say its an asteroid - i say we redirect them all to space debris Pizza Puzzle

I would dispute any such move and merge. Whether you think the categories are meaningful or not, they are nonetheless used by astronomers worldwide. Semantics are meaningful. Bryan

Try adjusting your sarcasm filter; its clearly broken. Pizza Puzzle

So, bringing the discussion back to the topic: should Quaoar be listed as the largest asteroid or not? If asteroid is a standalone concept (say, an undifferentiated body orbiting a star) and if Quaoar fits the definition, then we should put it first. But, it asteroid is a relative concept (like hill is to mountain), then we don't have lists of the tallest hills in the world, so the whole table of largest asteroids is kind of silly.

I can see the argument both ways -- hike395

I've only heard Quaoar described as a Kuiper belt object. Also asteroids are often distinguished from other sub-planetary bodies by being rocky but most of the time an asteroid is called an asteroid if any part of its orbit is within the orbit of Jupiter and it is not a comet, moon (or meteoroid - not sure where the cut off is though - it may be a mountain/hill thing). Comets are composed of a very large percentage of volatiles. However, to complicate the picture there are burned out comets which have lost most of their volatiles that are now called asteroids (it still doesn't break the definition). Kuiper belt objects are so named because of their position and not really based on their composition (although due to their distance from the sun and the fact that so much damn water and other volatiles were created from our proto-planetary disk, it is thought that these objects have a high percentage of volatiles - but I haven't heard about any spectral studies to back this up though). That knowledge is from my Geology of the Planets class I took a few years back and the class textbook Moons and Planets, Fourth Edition, William K. Hartmann, (Wadsworth Publishing Company; 1999) ISBN 0-534-54630-7 pages 159-161. IIRC many of the non-comet objects in between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune have a messed up and uncertain classification (although comets at that distance won't have tails so it is kind of hard to distinguish them from more rocky bodies, again IIRC). --mav 06:44 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)~

OK, so last night I thought: the IAU should have figured this all out, right? Nope. There is no official IAU definition for a planet! People are still quibbling about it. So, some people same Quaoar is a planet, some say an asteroid, and some say a KBO (Kuiper Belt Object). What a mess. This is probably what Pizza Puzzle was alluding to, above.

This definitional mess certainly casts doubt on the table of largest asteroids. I've got an idea: I'll change the header to say "Table of Largest Asteroids inside the orbit of Jupiter" and then it will be correct. -- hike395

Actually, the IAU does have a definition for what planets are, at least within the solar system; planets are any of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. There's a lot of debate over how to classify extrasolar planets, especially with brown dwarf stars in the picture, but they're a recent discovery so confusion is understandable.

As for renaming the table, I object. When I first created it I used a list of "biggest asteroids" from an astronomy book that did not give their orbital diameters, and I think a few others may have been added from other sources since then as well. Do you know for a fact whether all of those asteroids really are within the orbit of Jupiter? And even if they are, Jupiter's orbit is not part of any definition of asteroid that I'm aware of. What if we discover a big asteroid between Jupiter and Saturn? Bryan

Ah but the IAU isnt a definitive source either, some respectable sources now say that Pluto isn't a planet, but rather it is a Kuipter Belt object. There isn't a definitive definition, but certainly the spirit of the list is to refer to those relatively small rocky things that lie mostly between mars and jupiter. Pizza Puzzle

Bryan -- The IAU has an enumerated list of solar planets, but that's not what I would call a definition. The lack of definition definitely affects the status of Quaoar, and hence the table: should Quaoar be in it or not? See [1] (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planet_denitions_030227.html)[2] (http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/02/26_planet.shtml) for some of the controversy.

If Quaoar is not a planet, it might not still be an asteroid; Kuiper belt objects seem to be considered a class of their own based on what I've read. For now, perhaps a similar table to the "biggest asteroids" one covering the "biggest KBOs" could be put over in the KBO article. I'll start putting one together, in fact. If they ever end up being merged, it should be fairly straightforward to do so. Bryan

And, yes, I do know that the entire list in within Jupiter. I knew it from the discovery dates, but if you'd like to check my source for the additional data, please see [3] (http://arnold.usno.navy.mil/murison/Asteroids/OrbitalElements.html).

Thanks, I can accept the caveat now that I know it is indeed true. :) Bryan

I think the updated table nicely sidesteps the controversy, which can be worked out by the IAU definition wonks and then we can put it in Wikipedia. -- hike395

Oh, and don't worry about discovering a huge asteroid between Jupiter and Saturn: any asteroid > 200 km there would have already been detected by now. It's the Kuiper Belt objects that I'm worried about, and they are much much further away. -- hike395

And then there's 2060 Chiron. It's large (upper estimate= 208km diameter), it's orbit is beyond Saturn. It has an appreciable coma. It's probably a KBO that was kicked into a lower orbit [4] (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/chiron.html). Is it an asteroid? Should it be listed? This is the sort of mess I'm trying to avoid by restricting the table to list only those asteroids within Jupiter's orbit. I'm not claiming that is the definition of all asteroids, just the definition for this particular, unambiguous, NPOV Wikipedia table. -- hike395

Fortunately, Chiron's size is below the smallest asteroid currently on the table, so that particular mess is very easy to ignore for the immediate future. Perhaps Pizza Puzzle's at-the-time sarcastic suggestion of a space debris article could be useful as a sort of "disambiguation page" which lists asteroids, KBOs, Oort cloud objects, etc. with brief descriptions of how they're distinguished in Wikipedia. Bryan

Oh, just noticed while building that page; Chiron's classified as a Centaur, which appears to fill in the definitional region between the asteroids and Kuiper belt. That also helps remove Chiron from immediate classification messes. Bryan

Check this out: Crazy Names: The Solar System's Nomenclature Wars (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=96&ncid=96&e=6&u=/space/20030812/sc_space/crazynamesthesolarsystemsnomenclaturewars) --mav

Earths 2nd Coorbital [5] (http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/AA29/AA29.html) my personal fav [6] (http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.html) my site [7] (http://members.tripod.com/zephyr46/postmoderncogmap/id3.html)

Number of asteroids

I changed the number of asteroids to a much larger and much vaguer number. We had listed 9000 discovered which is far too low. The Minor Planet Center mentioned almost 15,000 numbered asteroids in 1999 before most of the computerized searches hit ful swing. NEAT claims over 5,000 new designations and LINEAR over 198,000! But they don't specify what kind of objects are being designated. I presume mostly asteroids. The committee to investigate a replacement for Spaceguard estimates half a million near earth asteroids over 50 meters. Asteroids are first designated, than numbered, than named as they meet better criteria. Can anyone find a recent number of numbered asteroids? Rmhermen 16:12, Mar 18, 2004 (UTC)

[8] (http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/NumberedMPs75001.html) goes until 79084. andy 16:17, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. Rmhermen 16:30, Mar 18, 2004 (UTC)

Definition

Removed from article: Other issues include location and composition. Among the planetoids, the most narrow (and least controversial) definition of "asteriod" uses different terms based on orbit:

• Asteroids are those minor planets with stable orbit between Mars and Jupiter
• Centaurs are minor planets between Jupiter and Saturn
• Trans-Neptunian objects are minor planets past Neptune
• Comets are objects that have highly ellipical orbits that cross inside the orbit of Neptune

Of these objects, all but the asteroids are predominantly made of ice.

Not only is this not the least controversial, I don't think these definitions are correct. Under this defintion there are no Trojan asteroids, no near earth asteroids, etc. Not all object with highly elliptical orbits that cross within Neptune are comets and some short-period comets don't cross Neptune's orbit. Rmhermen 21:36, Mar 20, 2004 (UTC)

Definition of Centaurs is wrong also as Chiron has a perihelion between Saturn and Neptune. Rmhermen 21:39, Mar 20, 2004 (UTC)

I think they all should be called "asteroids" (or minor planets) unless they exhibit cometary activity. Jyril 10:20, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)

About asteroid stub articles

Since almost nothing is known about individual asteroids, I think that a complete article needs only

• data table
• mention about its location (Main belt etc.) and group/family
• discoverer and discovery date
• origin of the name <-- I need help on this

The Dictionary of Minor Planet Names by Lutz D. Schmadel gives this infomation. It's expensive and I don't have a copy. For a few historical asteroids the origin of the name has been lost. -- Curps 11:16, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)

If these are the only things known about a particular asteroid, I'd suggest that it doesn't even warrant a stub article; the big tables of asteroids could just be expanded to hold this data instead. Bryan 15:27, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)

And if possible,

• composition and color
• known stellar occultations
• shape models
• pecularities of lightcurve
• radar observations
• suspected/known satellites

Naturally spacecraft-visited and other notable asteroids should have much more than that. Jyril 09:57, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)

When did they figure out it was a belt?

The section on asteroid discovery was very interesting to me, and is the reason I came to this article. I wish someone would add information about when the accumulating data on asteroids clearly indicated the existence of the "asteroid belt." Jdavidb 19:09, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Apparently the term "asteroid belt" was first coined in SF, not astronomy, as early as 1931. A search of the NASA ADS Abstracts database finds the first use of "Asteroid Belt" in an abstract in Frank J. Kerr and Fred L. Whipple, Possible explanations of the secular acceleration of PHOBOS and Jupiter V, Astronomical Journal, Vol. 56, No. 5 p. 131 (Oct 1951). Their use of the term seems casual, however, so it was clearly in use before that date (this is more a reflection on the ADS Abstracts database incompleteness than anything else).

Urhixidur 23:39, 2004 Aug 25 (UTC)

Link suggestions

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French article, please merge

Please merge the information from the semi-poorly translated French article at Asteroid/French. Thank you. -- AllyUnion (talk) 12:50, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Why? It looks like it is mainly a translation of this page to begin with. Rmhermen 13:33, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Rmhermen: everything in the French article is already in here (there is more detail here), except for the fact that Vesta is visible to the naked eye: not sure where to fit that in. -- hike395 15:18, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I just noticed the paragraph about the discovery of Ceres -- I'll fit that in. -- hike395

Looks like I am late but here is my detailed look responding to AllyUnion's message on my talk page:

"One of the things I noticed that was missing from the English article is a notable asteroid section."

No, because we have separated out the List of noteworthy asteroids in our Solar System as well as having the List of asteroids, List of asteroids named after important people, List of asteroids named after places as well as Meanings of asteroid names and Pronunciation of asteroid names.

There should be an article link or a summary none the less. -- AllyUnion (talk) 18:48, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There is, and always has been, a link to these articles. Rmhermen 23:02, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

"The other are the images, which are not present."

We have fewer pictures, perhaps that should change. The 3 pictures which differ are already present on the pages of the individual asteroids in better resolution or description. They could be added to the asteroid article. The animated piture is certainly nice.

"If you notice, the information may be the same, it is just that the French article is slightly more detailed." "If you look closely, their section of "The discovery of the first asteroids" is more detailed than the English history section, with minor information missing."

• Starting from the bottom, the 3 nav bars are directly copied from us. Our links section has the same link and more and we have a see also section that the French version lacks completely. We have a long "Asteroids in fiction and film" that the French article lacks completely also.
• Our noteworthy asteroids is a separate article. Our spectral classification section is superior in detail and the additional details in the French are treated in separate articles such as the arbitrary addition of only 3 of the 11 additional classes or the class details.
• Our denomination section needs a little work and probably moved earlier in the article but is more detailed. I see the French article has these details in the Modern methods section.
• What the French article has under principal groupings we have in the separate article Minor Planets - which subject the French article fails to mention at all. The French article also misidentifies cubewanos and promotes Trojans to an odd level of importance. But perhaps a less detailed description than that found on minor planets could be added to the asteroid article for some of the major groups. Not sure it is necessary though.
• The French article has no unmannned exploration section, nor any mention of von Zach or Wolf. It does go into more detail about the discovery of 1 Ceres although we have more detail in our Ceres article. Is it useful to expand this on the asteroid article?

"My suggestion of merging was that I see the French article is a Featured article and the English article is not. The objections that may be raised is the layout of the article, and being too brief in certain areas where the French article is not."

It is clear that the standards for featured article are not the same between encyclopedias. I know that the French version would not qualify through our process, especially the "how-to" observation section and no footnotes or references sections. Also I don't believe that our article has ever been proposed for featured status.

This line from the French article is not in our description of asteroid naming. Is it a useful addition? "The appearance receives a designation, made up of the year of discovery, a code of two letters representing the week of discovery, and of a number so more than the one discovered one took place in this week (example: 1998 FJ74). When the orbit of an asteroid is confirmed, it receives a permanent number (example: (26308) 1998 SM165), then, later, a name (example: 1 Ceres)." Rmhermen 15:25, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

I factored in the Ceres discovery already --- seemed short enough and relevant. The material in the paragraph immediately above is well-described at provisional designation: I should check to see if we link to that article in a prominent way. -- hike395 15:47, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

My apologize to those who have already worked on this article so much. I do feel that the article could be nominated for a Featured Article status, but it does seem lacking in pictures, and I was attempting to discover what made the French article a Feature Article and what made the English one not one... aside from it not being nominated. However I feel that looking at the French article and seeing the differences between the two is important. Their NPOV and our NPOV are different, and we can learn from something by looking at their article version. After all, if we can make improvements to the English article simply by looking at the French version, why not? -- AllyUnion (talk) 18:48, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't beleive NPOV has anything to do with it. And asking us to merge in information that we have already purposely removed to separate articles dosesn't seem productive. I don't believe that the French article would have made it through our Featured article process. It seems very incomplete and unbalanced, lacks a strong lead, and in a couple places is actually incorrect. Rmhermen 23:02, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

I just moved the article to Talk:Asteroid/French, since it's a "working" document that shouldn't be part of the article namespace. Bryan 22:40, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

References

It would be nice to have some references from books and such for Wikipedia:Cite sources in order to be nominated as a featured article. At least include a further reading section. -- AllyUnion (talk) 19:45, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia-specific self-references

Wikipedia drops the parentheses for named asteroids because it makes the text somewhat easier to read, because this convention is already quite common elsewhere, and because, frankly, it would be too much work to convert the existing pages to the formal format... (for unnamed asteroids, Wikipedia does use the parentheses because the risk of confusion is much too great otherwise).

Updating asteroid information

I noticed that some of the information in

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Asteroid&action=edit&section=2

was not correct and I corrected it. However, I noticed that my correction of "the last numbered and named minor planet was 95959 Covadonga." to "the last numbered and named minor planet was 99905 Jeffgrossman." was immediately reversed and called "vandalism". Here is the reference to my correction:

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/NumberedMPs95001.html

Perhaps my "vandalism" could be undone?

68.145.140.118

Someone was too careless checking your edit. No harm was done, looks like you fixed it by yourself. I really recommend you to register, because anonymous editors are often suspicious. And it also gives better anonymity. Now everyone can see your IP address.--Jyril 13:23, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)