Starship Asterisk*

Artistic impression of two near earth objects. Credit: ESA / P. Carril

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Three astronomers from Leiden University (the Netherlands) have shown that some asteroids that are considered harmless for now, can collide with the earth in the future. They did their research with the help of an artificial neural network. ...

Using a supercomputer, the researchers integrated the orbits of the sun and its planets forward in time for 10.000 years. After that, they traced the orbits back in time while launching asteroids from the earth's surface. During the backwards calculation, they included the asteroids in the simulations in order to study their orbital distributions at today's date. In this way, they acquired a database of hypothetical asteroids for which the researchers knew that they would land on the earth's surface

Astronomer and simulation expert Simon Portegies Zwart (Leiden University) explains: "If you rewind the clock, you will see the well-known asteroids land again on earth. This way you can make a library of the orbits of asteroids that landed on earth." The library of asteroids then served as training material for the neural network. ...

• Astronomy & Astrophysics 634:A45 (Feb 2020) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201935983
• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2001.04177 > 13 Jan 2020