Comments on: Ryugu, like Bennu, appears to have rocks from other asteroids https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/ryugu-like-bennu-appears-to-have-rocks-from-other-asteroids/ Wed, 23 Sep 2020 09:05:27 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: LocalFluff https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/ryugu-like-bennu-appears-to-have-rocks-from-other-asteroids/#comment-1088849 Wed, 23 Sep 2020 09:05:27 +0000 https://behindtheblack.com/?p=69351#comment-1088849 @mpthompson
Just from intuition, so take a grain of asteroidal salt with it, but I would think that most asteroids today are debris from violent impacts. And that this debris tends to end up in similar orbits with similar speed so that they can reform by merger. That “billions of years” thing conducts a selection process.

I haven’t heard of any asteroidal collision being observed in real time! Are they so rare? Have I missed something or have all the asteroids missed everything in the last few decades?

]]> By: mpthompson https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/ryugu-like-bennu-appears-to-have-rocks-from-other-asteroids/#comment-1088836 Wed, 23 Sep 2020 05:27:43 +0000 https://behindtheblack.com/?p=69351#comment-1088836 I wonder if there are scenarios under which rocks can be gently liberated from one asteroid and be gently deposited on another asteroid. Normally, it seems that collisions in space should be very violent events. However, the gravitational field of asteroids are so weak that perhaps the violent forces a rock might experience being transferred between asteroids in similar orbits might be on the order to that which a baseball experiences being hit with a bat.

If the if the forces involved are small enough perhaps the process of sharing rocks is not something isolated to early formation, but an active process that is still occuring.

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