By 
February 15th, 2016
The asteroid that exploded near Chelyabinsk, Russia on Feb. 15, 2013 has provided scientists new insights into the risks of smaller asteroid impacts. This 3D simulation of the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion by Mark Boslough was rendered by Brad Carvey using the CTH code on Sandia National Laboratories’ Red Sky supercomputer. Andrea Carvey composited the wireframe tail. Photo by Olga Kruglova.
Credit: Sandia National Laboratories
The Chelyabinsk superbolide of February 15, 2013 created a whopper of a mess just south of the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia.
But where in space did the Chelyabinsk space rock come from?
Spanish astrodynamicists, brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos and Sverre J. Aarseth, a scientist of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) have taken a hard look at that question.
Their work has been published by The Astrophysical Journal.
Dynamical relative
The results of their modeling suggest that asteroid 2011 EO40 is a good dynamical relative of the parent body of the Chelyabinsk superbolide…although there is no spectroscopic evidence linking genetically 2011 EO40 to Chelyabinsk, at least not yet.
They report that the common origin of both celestial objects is a possibility that cannot be discarded using the currently available evidence.
The results obtained by the team indicate that the Chelyabinsk impactor likely passed a gravitational keyhole on February 15, 1982 – during a close encounter with Earth at a distance shorter than 0.0015 AU.
As a result of this close encounter, the initial 2011 EO40-like trajectory of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid was changed into the one that drove the meteoroid to strike the Earth over three decades later.
Tangled web
The researchers do admit that it is very difficult to know the exact asteroid that gave origin to the Chelyabinsk superbolide because in the neighborhood of our planet there is a tangled web of overlapping gravitational resonances that confines asteroids of heterogeneous, or diverse, origin to very similar orbits.
“These gravitational resonances create an environment like that of the great cities that attract people from different places and with very diverse backgrounds,” says de la Fuente Marcos, who adds: “Having two very similar orbits today does not imply that these orbits were also similar in the remote past.”
Video catalog!
A number of video records obtained by casual eyewitnesses, dashboard cameras in cars, security, and traffic cameras have been made publicly available on the Internet. These represent a rich repository for future scientific studies of this unique event.
This catalog of video records of the 2013 Chelyabinsk superbolide can be found here:
http://meteor.asu.cas.cz/Chelyabinsk/
The new research by Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos and Sverre Aarseth is to be published next month by the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
This work is now available at:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/812/1/26
Posted in Space News
