Expect a Major Asteroid Strike in Your Lifetime, Says NASA Head (cnet.com) 219
This week, as scientists work through an exercise simulating an imminent asteroid impact with Earth, NASA's administrator Jim Bridenstine warned the real-world threat should be taken seriously. From a report: Bridenstine acknowledged "the giggle factor," the dismissive response the topic has been met with in the past, at the start of his keynote remarks Monday at the International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Maryland. "We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it's not about movies," he said. "This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life and that is the planet Earth." As part of the conference activities, space agencies will also be live-tweeting a fictional exercise simulating what it might be like if such an asteroid were discovered on a collision course with our planet.
really... (Score:5, Funny)
LHC (Score:2)
Re:really... (Score:4, Insightful)
Does the flat-Earth-rocket-guy* believe asteroids are also flat
It's pretty obvious that the flat-earth rocket guy believes asteroids are round, just like you play basketball with a round ball on a flat court. :-)
The REAL question is, does his model envision the Earth as a sheet which an asteroid will just tear through and carry on? Or is it more like a giant brick, which will be shattered? I never see anyone ask these flat earther guys just how DEEP they think the Earth is anyway... If there's any depth at all isn't the Earth technically at least a rectangular solid?
Re:really... (Score:5, Funny)
ask these flat earther guys just how DEEP they think the Earth is anyway...
Dude it's turtles, all the way down.
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If there's any depth at all isn't the Earth technically at least a rectangular solid?
Don't be stupid. It's cylindrical.
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Derpstick, Rocket Guy is on the record, multiple times, explaining that they paid him to put their advertisement on the side of his rocket, so he's happy to repeat their shtick while doing the promos.
And his day job is stunt man, so he was just tickled pink to have some lines to read.
Are you this stupid in real life, too? I mean, if you're going to take the time to heap abuse on somebody, at least read the fucking story about whatever thought crime you think they committed. He's obviously more rational than
Re: really... (Score:4, Informative)
There are worse things for the government to spend money on.
I'm selling asteroid insurance (Score:4, Funny)
...time to get rich [teecraze.com]
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We need to get this problem sorted ASAP... before Bruce Willis is too old to play a key role!
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You know, many years ago (back when there were actual printed magazines, with ads in the back - you know, the Dark Ages) I figured that with the right selection of magazines, a "meteorite insurance" scam would probably work pretty well. Actuarially, the chances of anyone being hit by a meteorite are infinitesimal (although it has happened, which could be used in the marketing material). I was thinking of selling a $100K lifetime policy for about $5-10 - until I discovered the size of the bond you need to pu
That's it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's it... (Score:5, Insightful)
That reminds me of the time Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked to comment on the claim that Earth seems perfectly designed for humans, per Creationism.
His reply was, in part, that Earth is in a galactic shooting gallery and reminded the audience that we are here because the dinosaurs got smacked. Take heed. Aside from asteroids and comets, there's also potential supervolcanoes and nearby supernovae.
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Re:That's it... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Earth _IS_ the perfect place for humans. Because we evolved here. If there are other life forms in the universe, they will be perfect for THEIR environments, because they evolved there.
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Wrong. Humans evolved into a niche that existed in the past from a lineage of similar creatures. This convergence into a niche is based on a local imperfect optimization. Further, long term species die out because niches appear and disappear over time and few species can adapt without diverging into other species, with those divergent species out competing them. The point is, just because humans are alive today means merely there hasn't been enough selective pressure (or simply bad luck) that has wiped
Re: That's it... (Score:2)
You're missing the point. The objection is retarded because nobody was using the word "perfect" in the pedantic sense that the AC took it.
Doug Adams & puddles (Score:2)
Same asteroid today, almost no effect. (Score:2, Interesting)
One of my favorite stops on the Route 66 tour is Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona. It happened just 50,000 years ago which is like "yesterday" in geologic time. Looks like nuclear bomb went off.
Yeah but if it happened in that exact spot again today, maybe ten people would die (though we'd have a decade of really cool winters from debris).
Come to think of it, I would think environmentalists would welcome large asteroids. For one thing- all natural. For another, most large asteroids would at worst destro
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Two words: Space Wall (Score:5, Funny)
Problem solved.
Re:Two words: Space Wall (Score:5, Funny)
and make the dinosaurs pay for it
Fossil Fuel (Score:5, Funny)
and make the dinosaurs pay for it
Given the amount of fossil fuel, we would need to burn to make this happen technically they would be.
Organized Labor (Score:5, Funny)
They never should have let the asteroids form a union. Now NASA is worried that they will strike at any time.
No cause for concern (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's a really BIG asteroid, then it's guaranteed not to come until the very end of your lifetime anyway.
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Sure, because that's how statistics work. But honestly, there's a lot of other things that is a lot more likely to kill me individually. Heck, even if a 100 MT nuke would wipe out my entire home town humanity would survive just fine. If you're talking about the one in a million/billion event that would wipe out nearly all of humanity I'm okay with not being part of the survivors. Without electricity and other basic functionality my skills are utterly worthless and honestly I got very little clue on how we g
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True, but your risk of being killed by an asteroid or comet strike is probably better than being killed by a terrorist attack.
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True. Because of the magnitude of the event. How many people have been killed by terrorists in the last 20 years? 20, 30 thousand? 9/11/2001 killed just under 3000; the Beslan school massacre killed about 300; the Bataclan theater attack killed under 200. Those have been the biggest ones to pop into memory. ONE asteroid strike could kill billions. So the risk is based on both the probability of the event and the number of potential deaths.
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What's the point of surveillance if we're unable to implement mitigation?
Depending on what is observed while we could have anything between several months to many years warning. With several years' warning, we might well be able to develop the technology we need. There is nothing like impending doom to focus the mind on a common goal: just look at how rapidly technology can develop during wars.
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What's the point of surveillance if we're unable to implement mitigation?
This is the point - asteroids that hit Earth aren't flying in out of blue, they are denizens of our part of the solar system and any asteroid that does hit Earth will have made near misses many times first, and at any rate will be observable in our neck of the space-woods most of the time.
An observation program, which is much cheaper than a mitigation program, can detect potential threats years, most likely decades (and for the really big ones, centuries) before they cause harm. With that kind of lead time
So no need to worry about Global Warming (Score:2)
There have been so few major meteor strikes in the last few thousand years of recorded history that we can certainly expect another one pretty soon.
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We've had one recently, the one 110 years ago had estimated energy of 3 - 5 megaton nuclear bomb. That would raise commute times if similar thing hit near a metropolitan area.
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Yes, we celebrate Asteroid Day on the anniversary of the event.
https://asteroidday.org/ [asteroidday.org]
Re: So no need to worry about Global Warming (Score:2)
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Nope, Chelyabinsk too wimpy to qualify as THE BIG ONE for our lifetimes.
we need thermonuclear level energy yields
Re:So no need to worry about Global Warming (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the problem is that when a moderate sized rock hits, it kills off most of the observers, and those who tell the tale relate it as legend or myth. For example, archaeologists excavating a site north of the Dead Sea speculate that a moderately-sized rock wiped out an ancient civilization, destroyed and scorched the city walls, and baked the soil, 3700 years ago. You may have heard of the place.
A little burg named "Sodom".
https://www.universetoday.com/... [universetoday.com]
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They are actually not all that rare of an occurence. The fact that humans inhabit so little of the surface of the earth we don't witness most of them.
Re: So no need to worry about Global Warming (Score:2)
There have been so few major meteor strikes in the last few thousand years of recorded history that we can certainly expect another one pretty soon.
That's not at all how statistics work. You're engaging in the Gamblers Fallacy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
What to do? (just random notes) (Score:2)
- Learn how to dig. Dig until you have a home underground
- Learn how to gather/treat water
- Learn how to grow food
- Learn how to get electricity from the wind. Learn how to conserve energy.
- Learn how to cooperate
- Learn how to defend yourself
- Learn how to live a drastically different and primal life.
Space Agencies? (Score:2)
As part of the conference activities, space agencies will also be live-tweeting a fictional exercise simulating what it might be like if such an asteroid were discovered on a collision course with our planet.
Space agencies? It's definitely a fictional exercise if it's only the space agencies doing the tweeting. They should hire TimeCube guy to add his input for a more realistic take on the response from humanity in general.
Prepare for? Yes. Expect? No. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a good idea to be ready to protect the only known life-supporting planet and likely only home of what we call intelligent life from asteroids, but unless this guy knows about some particular asteroid on course to slam into Earth in the next few decades, history says we should not expect one in our lifetimes.
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I've talked to history too. The thing about asteroids is they are unpredictable as long as we ignore the usual meteor showers. History was very insistent on this point.
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There have been (at least) four significant impacts since 1900
None of them significant enough to pose a threat to Earth's status as a "life-supporting planet".
Something analogous to the Tunguska blast could wipe out an entire metropolitan area with millions of casualties.
What's the chance of that happening ? Such metropolitan areas are pretty small targets compared to size of Earth.
Chelyabinsk? (Score:2)
Does Chelyabinsk count as "major"? Or Tunguska?
Re:Chelyabinsk? (Score:4, Interesting)
That same one over or near any major city today? 20-30 megaton equivalent? Millions dead.
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Since both of those exploded over Russia, I guess I'd be a little more nervous living there now.
On the other hand, Russia is very, very, big.
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Bridenstine went on to say that the cause of detecting, tracking and studying asteroids and other near-Earth objects began to be taken more seriously following the Chelyabinsk event of 2013, when a 20-meter (65-foot) meteor exploded in the atmosphere over a Russian city. The resulting shock wave damaged thousands of buildings and sent over 1,500 people to seek medical treatment, mostly for cuts from broken windows and flying glass. "These events are not rare; they happen," Bridenstine said, noting that one model shows we can expect an event of the same magnitude as Chelyabinsk about every 60 years.
Re:Chelyabinsk? (Score:4, Funny)
Fun fact; while most of the injuries were caused by flying glass (and a lot of the injuries were to the eyes), the injured were standing AT the glass windows wondering what the bright flash had been. Except in one classroom, where the old teacher, remembering her Soviet drills, ordered her students to hide under their desks. Nobody was injured in that classroom. Proving what we already knew; "Duck and Cover" is a valuable thing to know. Bright flashes in the sky are bad news.
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Dear Jim (Score:3)
Unless you know something that we don't ( and if you do, we're certainly all ears ), people have been proclaiming " The end is nigh " since the end was even a concept.
Yet, here we are, still having this discussion all these years later.
A significant impact ( significant implying extinction level event ) is certainly possible given a long enough time span but, at our current level of technology and general understanding of the universe, if it were to happen . . . . there really isn't a damn thing we can do to stop it. Hell, we probably wouldn't even see it coming until the last minute ( if we're lucky ).
So I fail to see the benefit of worrying about it.
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I'd call a hundred kiloton blast over a major city "significant." Airbursts of that size come around every thirty years or so, although none over a city so far.
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I'd call a hundred kiloton blast over a major city "significant." Airbursts of that size come around every thirty years or so, although none over a city so far.
For any individual, such an event would be very low on the list of most likely causes of death. For humanity, it would not be a threat.
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And yet fairly far above some of the threats we spend an awful lot of money on.
We Just Need to Leave the Planet (Score:2)
Douglas Adams told us how in the 1980's:
https://www.goodreads.com/quot... [goodreads.com]
Funny enough, the Kremlin joke has held up remarkably well over the decades...
Not so long ago (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if they are referring to this recent discovery of a massive impact crater discovered under Greenland ice [youtube.com]. Considering the age of the ice it is quite feasible that the Younger Dryas [wikipedia.org] event was from asteroid strike.
We pass through Taurid [wikipedia.org] meteor shower twice a year so it would seem we have simply been lucky. Maybe governments will start to take this threat a little more seriously, we certainly have the technology to deal with it.
Due we can't get Flint, MI (Score:3)
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He's not wrong... (Score:4, Informative)
Just on a quick'n'dirty survey through this list [wikipedia.org] gives 10 events in the last hundred years that would have not been a good thing to happen over a large population centre, and one that did (and it was not a good thing, although not really what you'd call catastrophic).
War of the worlds Part Deux (Score:3)
What are the chances that our Twitterati unwashed masses will confuse the live tweet simulation for the real thing and go into a panic about a real asteroid strike ?
Noo (Score:2)
Donâ(TM)t tell me they unionized.
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Bridenstine's credibility (Score:2)
Bridenstine is a Republican, and he toed the Republican party line while in the House, including its denials of science and women's rights.
When it became clear he was in line for the NASA job, he stopped doing his Congressional job.
He may be right about the impact threat, but he has no credibility with me.
Expect it in my lifetime? (Score:2)
It hasn't happened for about 60 million years, why now? Others tell me I should expect Jesus to come back in my lifetime.
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call it "orange matter", it will then get more attention from the scientific community.
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The rock worshiped by the Moslems in the Mecca mosque called Ka'ba is a meteorite. If the next asteroid strikes there and takes out the oil supply of the world, would it be a good thing or a bad things? Good, fossil fuel burning and global warming will stop. Bad, the civilizational collapse will happen and it would not matter if the world gets too hot or not.
Not even fucking close [wikipedia.org]. And Saudi Arabia isn't even number one...
Never fucking mind oil shale [wikipedia.org] The US alone probably has ten times Saudi Arabia's crude oil reserves.
Must be nice to be number one! (Score:3)
That's an interesting Wikipedia link.
The country with the most oil in the world isn't even all that big of a country, the population is only 6% of the US population. With all that oil, all that wealth to go around, I bet it's a great place to live.
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Quite so. Just remember that some of the countries (e.g. Saudi Arabia) on that list consider their actual reserves a very sensitive piece of intelligence, so they keep it highly classified. This means that they could have significantly higher reserves than the estimates on the list.
As an aside, it also explains why the US is hell bent on regime change in that small country.
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Dacia [wikipedia.org] had a lot of gold. A whole mountain full. They were literally sitting on a gold mine. Then the Romans came, and Dacia ceased to exist.
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Except for the Free Dacians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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There's a little more to it than how much oil you've got lying around. Except for the conventional oil in the middle east, and a few other places, oil isn't really economical to burn because it requires almost as much energy to acquire as it provides. We continue to use it for transportation because we have a lot of infrastructure dedicated to doing so. If the middle east got wiped out there would still be oil in the world, but it would be much less economical to burn it, despite the convenience.
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oil isn't really economical to burn because it requires almost as much energy to acquire as it provides
Wow, I haven't seen Peak Oil BS in years. Makes me nostalgic for the days when people on Slashdot argued about things other than politics. Ah, the good old days.
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Not peak oil. We're pumping it faster than ever, and will probably continue to do so for a while longer anyway. But how many oil-fired power plants have you seen around? Coal and hydro have much, much higher energy return on investment than oil does. Gas is higher than non-conventional oil too, and even so, we mostly use gas for levelling plants.
The EROI on American shale oil is somewhere around 2-5 to 1. Saudi oil is several times that. If a quarter of the world's supply suddenly blew up, by far the easie
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Oil fired power plants were an anomaly of the brief time window (Early 90s?) when oil was under $20/bbl. But that's about fuel cost, not about "energy return on investment". Natural gas has been amazingly cheap for a long time now, so gas-fired plants are all the rage.
People who go on about "energy return on investment" are usually arguing that civilization will collapse because oil will somehow cost more energy to extract than it provides.
Re: Once it hit Saudi Arabia (Score:4, Informative)
The Slashdot AC, such a wonderful personality. And such confidence.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
Re: Once it hit Saudi Arabia (Score:2)
Your articles show that the original guy was full of shit, and that the guy you're apparently disagreeing with was right. How the hell did you get modded insightful? Nobody bothered clicking the links?
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Not sure what you're referring to. If you'd like to be more specific, perhaps we can discuss? Unless you're just here for the name calling?
Re: Once it hit Saudi Arabia (Score:2)
I'm referring to the fact that your articles both point out that the EROI is way higher that originally claimed for both conventional oil extraction methods and for shale oil. I'm not sure what's difficult to understand about that. And what name did I call you, exactly? I've met a lot of people who are quick to throw up the "I'm offended card", but this might be a new record ...
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I'm not sure about "way higher". They do point out it's (maybe) higher, depending on what you count, but still nowhere near as high as conventional middle east oil. It's also well below what many estimates suggest is the minimum viable EROI for a modern civilization.
I think what you're referring to is the counting of "internal energy." The second paper mentions that oil shale EROI is about 1.5:1 if you count internal energy. Shell seems to think their process gives about 6:1 (which is in line with other es
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So... Anonymous Coward is your real name? Good to know.
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But you're correct. It could be agate. Saudi Arabia has not allowed the non-Muslim researchers to examine the Kabba and publish their findings.
Because only non-Muslim's can do science? A Muslim researcher could determine what sort of stone it is just as easily. The Saudis don't allow anyone to study the Black Stone.
Very bad (Score:3)
If the next asteroid strikes there and takes out the oil supply of the world, would it be a good thing or a bad things?
If the asteroid is so large that it takes out the oil deposits in the entire Middle East it will be a very bad thing for the entire globe because a strike that huge is going to do a lot more than just take out the oil deposits.
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Yes, I'm pretty sure impact winter is not the ideal solution to global warming...
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And Moslim, to anyone who cares, is not white power speak. It's the way that Muslim is spelt in other European languages. Not to mention:
"The Fotooh al Sham": being an account of the Moslim conquests in
https://books.google.com/books... [google.com]
Muammad b. 'Abdallah al- Azd al-Bar - 1854
SAHIH MOSLIM (THE AUTHENTIC HADITHS OF MUSLIM) 1-4
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I'm really fucking old.
Just what I was thinking. There are a large number of 98 year olds in the world, so I'm guessing the "Major Meteor" will strike in the next year or two.
Rejuvenation (Score:2)
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Protecting the only planet we know? Are you serious? Are.You.FUCKING.Serious. Humanity has utterly trashed this planet, without regard to anything but the pursuit of money. And now you expect me to believe that you diseased creatures suddenly care about your own house? You idiotic freaks had better care more about the insects you are wiping out en masse, to extinction.
You're going to starve to death long before the asteroid hits you. You've known for year, decades even, that you are on the path to destruction. Don't even try to get me to give a shit about this anymore. Asteroid? Look. I will stand out on the street corner, praying PRAYING mind you, with every ounce of my convictions, "COME TO MOMMA", asteroid, this way, this way.
What a joke. What a pathetic hypocritical JOKE you diseased truth hating creatures are.
Bend over cover your head, and kiss your ass goodbye.
Meds.
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Compared to the rest of human history, your life is great. Electricity, hot and cold running water, the ability to travel anywhere in the world, maintained roads to anywhere. Trump is nothing. Get over it. There is no "us" vs "them". We're all just people trying to get through life. If I've learned anything in my 44 years on this planet, it's that some people let themselves become miserable no matter how good their life is. What they don't realize is that they DECIDE to be that way. It's a choice. Go outsid
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What the AC forgot to add that despite all this wonderful goodness there is one horrible existential threat that must never be forgotten - Clinton's email server.
(Do I need to add "/s", yeah probably...)
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I don't think he meant asking the military to shoot at asteroids. A trillion dollars a year would buy a lot of surveillance, technology development and deep space redirection missions if given to a willing space agency.
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A large nuclear weapon detonated on the SIDE of a space rock would push it ever so slightly sideways and might deflect it enough to miss. With enough lead time, it wouldn't take much.
For example, the asteroid Apophis, a few years before its 2037 CPA.
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What about science and probability is it that you fail to understand?
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Well, not everything is orbiting in the same direction. There are retrograde asteroids and comets - uncommon, but not unknown.
But the main reason that some things come in crossing the Earth's orbit at high speed is that things in a "same general direction" orbit occasionally come close to one of the large outer planets (Jupiter, most often ; but they're all guilty to some degree) which deflects the object into an eccentric
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