A new study suggests that Earth’s enormous gravitational pull may serve as a built-in defense system that could protect the planet from catastrophic, civilization-ending killer asteroid “raids”, according to The Independent.
Scientists say the tidal force that determines how the Moon causes tides in Earth’s oceans can in some cases be strong enough to tear objects apart in space in a process called “wave turbulence.”
For example, scientists say that parts of Comet Shoekar-Levy 9 were torn apart by Jupiter’s tidal forces in the early 1990s, sending much smaller pieces of the space rock crashing into the planet. However, astronomers have not yet found sufficient evidence that Earth-like planets disrupt the tidal movement of passing asteroids.
Although modeling studies suggest that near-Earth asteroids could be destroyed by tidal forces during slow, close encounters with the first four rocky planets in the solar system, such tidal disturbances for near-Earth asteroids have not been directly observed.
Scientists say that such disturbances have also not been attributed to any specific families of near-Earth objects.
In new research that has not yet been peer-reviewed, a team from Luleå University of Technology in Sweden provides evidence of wave turbulence in near-Earth objects during close encounters with Earth and Venus.
Scientists previously evaluated more than six years of asteroid data collected by the Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded program that detects near-Earth objects.
However, these observations did not predict how many asteroids exist at the distances at which Earth and Venus orbit the Sun.
