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Article: Fragmented asteroids may hold key to cosmic collisions
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- November 7, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1994 The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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BETHESDA, Md. -- The pelting that Jupiter received last summer
from about two dozen fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 may be
just one example of a multiple-strike phenomenon that could be more
common than astronomers had realized. Double hits, in fact, may have
happened many times on Earth.
William Bottke, a graduate student at the University of Arizona,
and Jay Melosh, a professor of astronomy there, say that many
asteroids that orbit near the Earth may have small moons of their
own.
Bottke and Melosh say that asteroids that come close to Earth or
any other planet are often broken into two or more pieces by the
planet's gravitational pull, similar to what happened to comet ...