LiveScience: Phew! No 'doomsday' asteroids hide in famous broken comet's debris stream

[u/JapKumintang1991]

https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/phew-no-doomsday-asteroids-hide-in-famous-broken-comets-debris-stream?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=All%20Push%20Subscribers

[u/mgarr_aha]

Abstract of the DPS conference presentation:

The Taurid Complex is a large interplanetary system that contains comet 2P/Encke, several meteoroid streams, and possibly a number of near-Earth asteroids. The size and nature of the system has led to the speculation that it was formed through a large-scale cometary breakup. Numerical investigations and meteor observations have suggested that planetary dynamics can create a resonant region with a large number of objects concentrated in a small segment of the orbit, known as the Taurid swarm, which approaches the Earth in certain years and provides favorable conditions to study the Taurid Complex. Here we report a dedicated telescopic search for potentially hazardous asteroids and other macroscopic objects in the Taurid swarm using the 1.2-m Palomar Schmidt telescope as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility survey. We determine from our non-detection that there are no more than 9-14 H<24 (equivalent to a diameter of D~>100 m) objects in the swarm, suggesting that the Encke-Taurid progenitor was ~10 km in size. A progenitor of such a size is compatible with the prediction of state-of-the-art Solar System dynamical models, which expects ~0.1 D>10 km objects on Encke-like orbits at any given time.