We Were Told Jupiter Was Our Shield
Milky Stellar
15,379 views
In July 1994, twenty one fragments of a broken comet hit Jupiter while the whole world watched. Out of that week came a sentence: Jupiter is our shield. It is in every textbook. Almost nobody checked it.
When two researchers finally ran the simulations, they found three different answers for three different populations. For comets from the Oort cloud, the shield is real, and the effect is enormous. For the icy bodies between the giant planets, a Jupiter makes things worse. And for asteroids, the population that supplies nearly every object capable of reaching us today, the presence of a giant planet can raise the impact rate rather than lower it.
The question was never whether Jupiter protects us. It was from what.
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Credits:
NASA
ESA: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Vi... (Visual assets provided by the European Space Agency - ESA. Used under the professional broadcasting authorization.)
ESO: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/
Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ma...
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COPYRIGHT & ASSET DISCLAIMER:
This video is created for educational and astronomical storytelling purposes. The visual assets, including space footage, images, and animations, are sourced from public domain databases and Creative Commons licenses provided by institutions such as NASA, ESA, ESO, and Wikimedia. Proper attributions for any CC-licensed materials are visually included in the video or listed below.
18 Comments
It is patiently waiting for the gentle nudge the gravity of another far-off massive object gives it to send it our way.
Hopefully by that time we would have the technology to avoid that disaster.
Meanwhile we are little more than smarter apes arguing over nothing of real importance.
We Were Told Jupiter Was Our Shield
Milky Stellar
15,379 views
In July 1994, twenty one fragments of a broken comet hit Jupiter while the whole world watched. Out of that week came a sentence: Jupiter is our shield. It is in every textbook. Almost nobody checked it.
When two researchers finally ran the simulations, they found three different answers for three different populations. For comets from the Oort cloud, the shield is real, and the effect is enormous. For the icy bodies between the giant planets, a Jupiter makes things worse. And for asteroids, the population that supplies nearly every object capable of reaching us today, the presence of a giant planet can raise the impact rate rather than lower it.
The question was never whether Jupiter protects us. It was from what.
-
Credits:
NASA
ESA: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Vi... (Visual assets provided by the European Space Agency - ESA. Used under the professional broadcasting authorization.)
ESO: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/
Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ma...
-
COPYRIGHT & ASSET DISCLAIMER:
This video is created for educational and astronomical storytelling purposes. The visual assets, including space footage, images, and animations, are sourced from public domain databases and Creative Commons licenses provided by institutions such as NASA, ESA, ESO, and Wikimedia. Proper attributions for any CC-licensed materials are visually included in the video or listed below.