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Re: Asteroid resonance - Reuter's

|The article below is misleading
|is several regards, not the least of which is that it refers to resonance as
|'nudging' an asteroid out of it's orbit, or 'knocking' it out, rather than
|'pulling' it out?   What precisely is the distinction between resonance and
|gravity?  Their net effect seems to be the same.
|

The 'nudgeing', 'knocking out' or 'pulling' or just descriptions of the
same thing: the pertubation of the asteroid's orbit due to orbital resonance with
a planet.  The article claims that a new model indicates that
Jupiter's pertubation effects are bigger than originally thought, and
the smaller planets like the Earth and Mars are really responsible for
the Near-Earth Objects.  It also claims all objects perturbed by Jupiter
will either hit the Sun or be ejected from the solar system.  However, once
any object starts to cross of the orbit of a planet, its ultimate fate will
be either it will impact another body (planet or Sun), or be ejected, and
once it reaches this planet-crossing state, it doesn't matter how its orbits 
was originally perturbed.

The thing lacking from the press release was how the model they are using
differs from the models used previously, and it does not indicate the
time span over which they did their simulations.  Also, it is not surprising
if the gravity of the smaller planets are affecting the asteroids in the 
main belt, but Jupiter will still have a larger effect, and I think that
ultimately it will be found that the asteroids are in fact affected by all
of the planets to some extent.

Ron Baalke

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