Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2011 July 12

= July 12 =

Astronomical interferometer wavebands
What are the wavelength or frequency endpoints of the "waveband" designations on List of astronomical interferometers at visible and infrared wavelengths? 99.24.223.58 (talk) 01:45, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * The article Photometric_system has a table. --Wrongfilter (talk) 07:19, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Evolution
We know many different species evolved in the history of animal kingdom. But why evolution has stopped after the arrival of Homo sapiens? We are the last product of evolution. Why no new species in being evolved? --111Engo (talk) 11:17, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Your premise is incorrect. Humans are not "the last product of evolution." Evolution continues, new species are being evolved.  We are just too short-lived to see it happening.  --- Medical geneticist (talk) 11:38, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Who says that evolution has stopped and that we are the "last product"? Evolution is a very slow process and is continuing (as far as I know), though only adaptation has been directly observed in real time.  We haven't been around for long enough to observe it happening in our species, though tiny changes currently observed might be part of the long-term process.  The view of evolution as being a linear process from simplest to highest lifeforms is not generally accepted.  The actual path is often very complex, with "dead ends" and convergence.   D b f i r s   11:42, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Evolution is a continuous and ongoing process and did not mysteriously stop with the arrival of Homo sapiens. One example of a new species that is much younger than Homo sapiens is the polar bear, which diverged from the brown bear about 150,000 years ago. Another even younger species is the London Underground mosquito. Gandalf61 (talk) 11:43, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Is any new biological trait observed among Homo sapiens within the last 10,000 years? --111Engo (talk) 12:19, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Lactose tolerance in adults, see here. Mikenorton (talk) 12:23, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The ability to digest lactose into adulthood (known as "lactase persistence") is a likely candidate. Lactose intolerance says it has only reached significant proportions in human populations within the last 10,000 years, linked to the spread of animal husbandry. Gandalf61 (talk) 12:26, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Also the prevalence of the Sickle cell trait in areas of high incidence on malaria (not sure that this one is proven). Mikenorton (talk) 12:45, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The sickle-cell trait has different variants evolved at different times. Blondness has evolved within the last 10,000 years or so. μηδείς (talk) 00:05, 16 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Your initial premise is clearly wrong, as others have pointed out. However, if you want to say, "why do humans seem to be less selected against genetically than other animals?", and we want to grant that perhaps this is true, the obvious answer is that humans are the first animals to develop big enough brains, and some happened to be under the right conditions to develop what we call civilization, technology, and so on, to the degree that we have. Note that it took humans a loooonnggg time to escape "nature, red in tooth and claw," and arguably we haven't escaped it all that well, even so. It is not like Homo sapiens showed up and suddenly humans were the dominant animal on Earth, or suddenly had control over our natural environment. If you want to know, "what factors led to the emergence of the kind of modern, big-city, big-production, big-technology civilizations?" you might take a look at Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel which does a very nice job of articulating all of the many factors that had to fall into place for the big, organized societies to rise up in the last few thousand years, which allowed for the kind of apparent "insulation" from natural selection that you are no doubt referring to. Even then, it isn't really perfect insulation, and to call that non-"natural" is a stretch. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:33, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Consider that anatomically modern humans are first observed in the fossil record at about 200,000 years ago and that the first human civilizations developed sometime in the Neolithic Revolution about 10,000 years ago.  That means that essentially modern humans existed for 190,000 years before deciding that farming and living in cities would be a good idea, or if you prefer that only 0.5% of human history has been civilized.  -- Jayron  32  15:40, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Farming in particular is not an obvious thing, as Diamond points out. It's not like early man sat around and said, "you what would be great? To be a farmer, a style of living that has not yet been invented!" It was a slow and difficult process and very early on it did not confer any major benefits over a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. (In fact, Diamond points out, early farmers probably had much poorer diets and caloric sources than did hunter-gatherers.) Furthermore, as Diamond points out, living in farming communities exposes you to all sorts of other risks, like epidemic diseases brought about through close contacts with domesticated animals. Anyway, the whole point is that it's too big (and interesting) a question to sum up as being somehow humans being magically "outside" of evolution. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:47, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Every other hominid species has been driven to extinction. Everywhere humans have gone, megafauna have disappeared. Climate change may be an issue, but I find the correlation worldwide striking. Most other primates and much fish are in danger of disappearing. And as Richard Dawkins has pointed out (The Extended Phenotype), as we select plants and other animals, they select us just as surely. Imagine Reason (talk) 00:05, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Hmm, looks like the arrival of Homo sapiens was an evolutionary accident. There is a solution. --111Engo (talk) 01:13, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

wireless power transmission
what is the circuit diagram ofireless power transmission??? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maryam chaudhry (talk • contribs) 12:19, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

what is the circuit diagram of wireless technology????? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maryam chaudhry (talk • contribs) 12:21, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Wireless energy transfer gives some detail but not a circuit diagram. At its simplest, just two coils would be sufficient.  Wireless technology often refers to the transfer of data over a wireless network, but I assume this is not what you were asking about.    D b f i r s   15:47, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Here is a diagram by Tesla. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:48, 13 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Electromagnetic power transfer of substantial energy is likely to involve thermal or ionizing radiation. 99.24.223.58 (talk) 18:53, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

How shall we name the phenomenon?
When material "Escapes" from inside the organ through it's membrane --- out. ?

Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.181.33.137 (talk) 13:17, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Do you refer to the serous membrane? EverGreg (talk) 13:27, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Osmosis is a method of passage through a membrane. Wanderer57 (talk) 13:33, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Neither really describes the phenomenon, if it exists without rupture of the cell walls. Osmosis is only water passing through the semi-permeable membrane, and serous fluid is a secretion rather than an escape, but I'm at a loss to provide a better answer.    D b f i r s   15:57, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Take a read of Secretion this refers to vesicle fusion and exocytosis. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:02, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, this could be interpreted as "escapes", so it does answer the OP's question. Please ignore the second part of my comment above.    D b f i r s   23:22, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Red-violet
Looking through a box of crayons, I encounter a color dubbed "red-violet". Red and violet are on opposite ends of the visible light spectrum. However, violet is a mix of blue and red. How can there be a cycle in a spectrum? Where on the spectrum does the "red-violet" color exist? 75.73.225.224 (talk) 14:33, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I believe you're confusing two things: the spectrum as a physical phenomena, and the colors our brain interpret the physical phenomena as being (as qualia). The human eye does not use a linear spectrum to interpret light; it uses a series of rods and cones which fire signals depending on what hits them. It's the way the eyes and brain are wired which makes the ends of the spectrum appear to loop together. Color vision has a lot more detail on this sort of thing. You might also look at Color_wheel, which discusses a bit the difference between actual human color vision and a perfectly looped color wheel. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:43, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * In the image you linked, the ends of the spectrum meet at black because both ends fade into invisibility. That's unrelated to the "line of purples". -- BenRG (talk) 16:36, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Other good reads in this regard are Imaginary color and Line of purples. There are many "non spectral colors" in the world, besides the purples are the browns and the pinks, and things like that.  They are usually made (spectrally) by combinations of lights of many different wavelengths, though some combinations are actually impossible (called Impossible colors).  For example, there is no "reddish-green" color.  -- Jayron  32  15:35, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I have often wondered if the perception of a "cycle" in the colors we can see might have something to do with frequency aliasing. Red light drifts out of our visible range at almost half the frequency at which blue light starts to drift into our visible range.  So, it seems plausible that we might be perceiving a "dropped octave" helping us connect the red back to the purple to the blue.  But, I don't think this is well supported by physiological models of the perception of color, nor by experiment with monochromatic light at the edges of our perceptual ranges.  It's difficult to find scholarly research, as most research work related to vision, and keyworded with "aliasing", tends to focus on spatial aliasing and moire patterns.  Nimur (talk) 21:13, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The illusion of a cycle comes from the fact that there are thee primary colors (because there are three different cones in our eyes) and three secondary color between them forming a triangle that can be easily deformed into a circle. If there were four primary colors and six secondary colors between them forming a pyramid, deformation into a circle would be impossible breaking the illusion of a cycle. Dauto (talk) 01:46, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

84,000 chemicals
What are the names and uses of the 84,000 chemicals in use today in the USA? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.181.43.47 (talk) 15:10, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * All of them? -- Jayron  32  15:29, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I started writing a list of the usage of dihydrogen monoxide got about 1% of the way and then my browser crashed. Nil Einne (talk) 16:05, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Here are few off the top of my head to get you started. Acetone, Benzene, Chloroform, Diethyl ether, ethane, Formaldehyde, gasoline, heptane, Iodine, kerosene, liquid nitrogen, Monosodium glutamate, naptha, oxygen, pentane, Salicylic acid, taurine.  Googlemeister (talk) 16:33, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * If you're looking to round out the alphabet, I suggest jasmone, quinine, rubidium chloride, uranium hexafluoride, vanadium carbide, water, xenon hexafluoroplatinate, yttrium aluminium garnet, and zinc telluride. - Running On Brains (talk) 18:10, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * This question is perhaps more sensible than it sounds. I believe the question refers to the TSCA Inventory, the list of chemicals registered under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, which includes about 84000 chemicals.  The full dataset can be downloaded from the US government here. --Colapeninsula (talk) 16:53, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Then we need to correct the OP's view that chemicals are all bad, perhaps by pointing that a lot more than 84,000 chemicals exist, including those that make up the human body and everything else around us. Most of them are quite nice chemicals. HiLo48 (talk) 17:22, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I would hazard an educated guess that there are indeed more than 84,000 times 84,000 chemicals known to man, especially if you include theorized compounds not yet isolated. - Running On Brains (talk) 18:10, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * FWIW, there are more than 60 million chemical compounds listed in Chemical Abstracts: http://www.cas.org/newsevents/releases/60millionth052011.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 148.177.1.212 (talk) 19:15, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Of course, all this also depends on your definition of "in use". But I believe Colapeninsula has stumbled upon the answer the OP was looking for. - Running On Brains (talk) 19:13, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I can't help but wonder how HiLo48 knew the OP holds the view that chemicals are all bad. Wanderer57 (talk) 20:35, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * A reasonable conclusion to draw based on Colapeninsula's post above about where the 84,000 figure came from. Unless you have other suggestions....? HiLo48 (talk) 23:21, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you HiLo48, I missed that turn. Wanderer57 (talk) 01:24, 13 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The view that some chemicals are harmless also invites some refutation. The classic data for this is a study by Rick Relyea of the University of Pittsburgh, who found that, like the EPA said, tadpoles were not harmed by ordinary environmental levels of Sevin (carbaryl, the stuff they were making in that tank that blew up in Bhopal).  But in the presence of substances that indicate the presence of predators, it is quite lethal!  Another example involved the interaction of melamine with a second related chemical in Chinese pet foods and tainted human foodstuffs, which lock together much like the bases of DNA to form huge two-dimensional flakes that harm the kidneys when they are excreted.  What this means is that you can't honestly say "this chemical is safe".  You can only say that the chemical seems safe under some set of circumstances you've investigated.  Since you can't investigate every combination of two chemicals, you cannot honestly say that using any given chemical is safe - unless, that is, it is some substance like water which has been present in the natural environment long enough for evolution to have had a fair chance to direct what the organism does with it, and even that only goes so far (e.g. water toxicity).  Sevin was not safe for amphibians, despite testing; melamine was not "mostly harmless" for humans, despite testing.  There's no way to detect these sorts of things except by exposing people to them and waiting until someone tracks down who was injured or killed. Wnt (talk) 22:47, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Of course, almost anything can be unhelpful in the wrong place, wrong concentration or at the wrong time. HiLo48 (talk) 23:21, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Besides who said anything about 'this chemical is harmless' or 'some chemicals are harmless'? Nil Einne (talk) 00:33, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * You don't need to work that hard to prove that any chemicals can be made dangerous. Here's simpler : Ten tons of the solid form of virtually any chemical will crush anybody it happens to fall on. APL (talk) 00:52, 13 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Only part of the answer thought and the easy part. A quick look at the list and the article suggests my belief there is no centralised database of every single use of every single chemical on that list, is correct. Trying to compile a usage of a list of ~84000 chemicals includings things like Formaldehyde, D-Glucose, Lanolin, C.I. Acid Orange 1 is like people have been saying from the beginning.... Nil Einne (talk) 00:29, 13 July 2011 (UTC)


 * A few chemicals I found to be individually and severally delightful: (In one Caldwell-Luc operation, in a renowned hospital):  Morphine, Cocaine, Nitrous Oxide, Vallium, and possibly local anesthetics not noted or remembered.  These chemicals made it amusing and pleasant to have a surgeon use a small chisel, while I was quite conscious,  to punch a hole above the upper teeth into a sinus creating an outlet to prevent recurrence of Sinusitis, a procedure that would have obviously been unendurably painful without anesthesia. I guess it was still painful, but with the nitrous it also seemed funny.  Edison (talk) 04:07, 13 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The druge that Edison mentions cross the blood-brain barrier once ingested. The article Addiction can be relevant where it notes that "Pleasure and enjoyment would have originally been sought; however, over a period of time involvement with the substance or activity is needed to feel normal." Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:40, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

The Chemical Abstracts Service registries have a running tally on their web site. It's in the low 61 millions at the moment. 99.24.223.58 (talk) 18:58, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Sycon
Is Sycon radially symmetric? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.179.68.190 (talk) 16:01, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Are you referring to a genus of sponge? If so, then it appears from diagrams that at least the arms of some genus members are typically radially symmetric, if not the entire organism. - Running On Brains (talk) 17:56, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Natural gas ownership in the US
I'm an American, and as I suspect is the case for most people like me, I have one and only one choice when it comes to who is my natural gas provider. In other words, they have a monopoly on my area. I would suspect this is the case in most localities (I have no reason to believe my locality is exceptional). To my own sense of right and wrong (which I realize has no jurisdiction on reality), this only seems fair if the company owns the land where the natural gas came from and paid to lay ALL the pipe to the houses from which it collects money. Do the natural gas companies in fact usually own the land from which they extract their product? If not, how does one company get into such a favorable position over all other hopefuls? 76.27.175.80 (talk) 18:23, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * There are several related issues which confounds answering all of your questions.
 * First, natural gas is extracted from the ground by a company who owns the mineral rights to do so. Mineral rights is a tricky thing, but generally different entities may own the surface of the land and the land underneath.  This entity which extracts the oil and/or gas is usually a completely private company, and can be of any size, from a small "mom-and-pop" operation to a large multinational corporation like BP or Exxon/Mobil.  These extraction companies sell the natural gas to the company that sells it to you.  That is, the "Gas Company" doesn't extract and refine the gas, they are simply the retailer.  They buy it on the wholesale gas market, much the same way that Walmart doesn't actually make the blue jeans you buy there.
 * Secondly, distribution of natural gas to your house is managed by a public utility. In the U.S., public utilities are semi-private companies which are heavily regulated by the government; in exchange for the monopoly they have on distribution, they give up a lot of their own freedom with regards to the rates they charge, how much profit they make, etc, which are regulated by the state governments.  The rationale they have over distribution is that, unlike many goods which are efficient to be produced and distributed by a single company, like say a car or bread or landscaping services, utilities like gas require a complex distribution system which would be HIGHLY inefficient if you had, say, several companies distributing gas to your city.
 * Lets say you decide to buy your gas from Joe's Natural Gas. So Joe's comes and lays pipes to your house.  Lets say your neighbor decides to buy from Bill's Natural Gas.  Does Bill's now lay another set of pipes to your neighbor's house?  Does every company have its own network of pipes?  What a mess if every time someone wants to install natural gas, they pick a company and that company has to find a way to dig giant trenches all over the place to lay new pipe!  Furthermore, what if you decided to leave Joe's and take your business to Bill's.  Does that mean Joe's comes and digs out all of the pipes that used to bring you gas, and Bill's has to lay new pipe?  What a complete mess that would be.
 * Instead, a single company is in charge of distributing natural gas to a jurisdiction. They lay one set of pipes, and everybody buys from them.  Yes, it isn't competitive, but in this case competition isn't so great, since the result of having an open market on public utilities is a rediculously inefficient thing.  So certain services, such as power, water, electric, solid waste removal, local landline phone services, etc. are managed as public utilities.  Since there isn't a "free market" regulating price, these services are heavily regulated by the state instead.
 * Thirdly, the company that laid the pipe isn't necessarily the company selling you the gas. Instead, the company selling you the gas probably leases the pipe from the pipeline company.
 * As a final note, you may find Oil and gas law in the United States an interesting read. -- Jayron  32  18:50, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that very informative answer, Jayron32. The "Gas Company" retailer from your first bullet, is that the same entity as the semi-private "Public utility" in your second bullet? 76.27.175.80 (talk) 19:05, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, for example SCANA is a gas and electric company which serves much of the Southeastern U.S. My personal Gas Company is their subsidiary PSNC Energy, which serves North Carolina.  -- Jayron  32  20:19, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

All this should be compared and contrasted to propane heating and cooking, as my parents in Connecticut have; this can be delivered by truck and safely stored in a tank on their property, therefore, there are several companies all equally capable of delivery. Thus: competition. I'm not sure why the same can not be done with natural gas, but I'm sure there are technical reasons.- Running On Brains (talk) 19:12, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I do see large AmeriGas tanks sometimes next to a non-residential building where I live. From UGI Corporation, that appears to be the largest propane marketer in the US. 76.27.175.80 (talk) 19:21, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Propane is distributed differently for several reasons. See Propane.  While natural gas leaks are also dangerous, methane being lighter than air tends to dissipate.  Propane is heavier than air, and so tends to sink and concentrate.  Contrawise, propane is well suited for tank distribution since it can be liquified while natural gas cannot, being above the critical temperature at which liquid natural gas can form.  As a result, compressed natural gas is much less efficient, in terms of heating capacity per unit volume than liquid propane, which is why natural gas is more suited for pipelines than tanks.  -- Jayron  32  20:19, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Cool, it didn't occur to me that natural gas could not form a liquid at ambient temperature. To paraphrase Bill Nye, Now I knowwwwwwwww - Running On Brains (talk) 20:45, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Keep in mind also that there could logically be competition between electric and gas for cost of heating and cooking, although in many cases one utility provides both services. μηδείς (talk) 20:03, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I live in a state where the two services are provided by two different companies, and there is no competition between them; gas heating is a LOT cheaper than electric. In everywhere that I have lived, electric heating is always the most expensive option; where I lived in New England previously there wasn't a widespread natural gas infrastructure, so everyone heated their homes using something other than electric (heating oil, coal, wood, concentrated wood pellets, etc.) because heating with electric was prohibitively expensive.  The only place where electric heating makes economic sense is in states where you literally almost never have to use it (say, Florida).  Otherwise, its always the worst option.  -- Jayron  32  20:16, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * There are a lot of places where the two are under the same company, such as Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Dominion Resources and Constellation Energy. Washington Gas has recently gotten into electricity brokering, in addition to selling gas.  Acroterion   (talk)   20:22, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * True, but the salient point in my post was that regardless of your own particular arrangement in how you purchase your energy needs, electric heating plain sucks in terms of cost. If you live in a place where you need to heat your home for many months at a time, and if (hypothetically) your home only had electric heaters, you could recoup the cost of installation in a matter of a few years by installing literally ANY other heating system.  The idea that competition between electric and gas for heating one's home would somehow make electric heating reasonably priced (which is what Medeis seemed to be arguing) is plainly not true.  -- Jayron  32  22:46, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Agreed, I've never encountered a situation (in the US Mid-Atlantic area) where electricity could beat natural gas for operating cost. The only variant I've seen where electricity can win is with large buildings equipped with water-loop heat pumps, where heat is only needed for a relatively short part of the year, as compared to air conditioning, so the additional cost of a gas connection is unattractive compared to the already-required cost of a large electrical service for the chiller-cooling tower units. In such circumstances, where much of the building's internally-generated occupancy heat is simply moved where it's needed, the boilers can be startlingly small, and the operating cost penalty ignored.   Acroterion   (talk)   15:56, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
 * The other place where electric heating makes sense is if you've got cheap hydropower. Both Quebec and Washington State meet that critera. --Carnildo (talk) 01:33, 14 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The thing to note about electric heat is that any electric plant ultimately produces waste heat (unless it uses cogeneration and physically distributes a liquid). This is because of limitations of generating usable work from difference in heat as per the Carnot cycle.  Whenever electric heat is used, some of the energy of the original fuel goes down the river or into a cooling pond. Wnt (talk) 05:12, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

I was simply pointing out that there is a choice, even if in certain locales one has a huge advantage over the other. But that situation shouldn't be taken for granted--it is caused by intentional policy. The high price of electricity in various locations is a result of regulation, not of the inherent costliness of, say, nuclear power. If you want competition to drive down prices you have to adopt a laissez-faire policy. It won't happen in artificial "managed competition" schemes such as the CLEC debacle in phone service in which MCI's massive fraud destroyed AT&T. μηδείς (talk) 18:43, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Earth-Moon formation contribution to the asteroid belt?
I have a theory based on no math or research, just a hunch.

Setup: I like the theory of the Moon being formed by a collision of a Mars sized planet with the Earth of the time.

Question: Could some of the material knocked off both parties have continued on and become part of (or all of) the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter? Since the collision was apparently tangential perhaps all the energy was not dissipated in the collision.

Thanks in advance for setting me straight! :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by EZ Pickins (talk • contribs) 22:25, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * No. The fragments fell back to earth due to earth's gravity. Any small fragments that might have escaped earth's gravity would have been left in a earth crossing orbit. They would not be in a orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Dauto (talk) 23:27, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Sure, it could have happened. (Not to assert that it did. Insufficient data). Fragments with greater than escape velocity naturally would have escaped, and if the directions and velocities were amenable, the escaped fragments could have become part of the asteroid belt.  Edison (talk) 03:56, 13 July 2011 (UTC)


 * How do you propose those fragments found their way to orbits between Mars and Jupiter? Dauto (talk) 05:43, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * If you have an object in orbit and apply an instantaneous thrust to it, it will end up in an orbit that crosses the starting orbit at the point where the thrust was applied (this is obvious if you think about it - how could it end up in any other kind of orbit?). That means a piece of the Earth thrown away from the Earth by the impact would end up in an Earth-crossing orbit. There are various things that could cause that orbit to change over the billions of years since the formation of the Moon, but I wouldn't expect a significant amount of material from Earth to have ended up in the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt is almost entirely made up of material that never coalesced into planets. --Tango (talk) 11:57, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * There is no guarantee that something which gets a big smack near the Earth won't get another big smack from something else before it returns to the starting orbit. No isolated system at all. The early solar system had millions of rocks of varying sizes hitting one another, with a few objects getting double tapped randomly such that they landed in this orbit or that orbit, beyond simple orbital mechanics. Edison (talk) 14:50, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Sure, it's theoretically possible, but entirely improbable. At best, a totally negligible percentage of the asteroid belt was formed this way.--Goodbye Galaxy (talk) 15:26, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Exactly. The probability that that is the correct explanation for the origin of the asteroid belt is somewhere between zip and nil. Dauto (talk) 19:48, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I said, in the very comment you are replying to, that there are various things that could cause the orbit to change. Another collision is actually the least likely - space is big, so things don't collide very often. Gravitational interactions and light pressure from the sun are more likely to cause significant changes. --Tango (talk) 14:04, 14 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm not by any means an expert here, but I think the issues are being oversimplified a bit. You can't take any arbitrary orbit within the solar system and expect it to persist for billions of years -- every orbiting object is constantly perturbed by all of the planets, most strongly by Jupiter.  There probably are only a few types of orbits that are stable over the long term, and they seem to be spaced in a more or less regular way; see Titius-Bode law.  All of the putative stable orbits are occupied by planets except one, which corresponds to the asteroid belt.  So I think it might be possible for an asteroid to start with a radically eccentric orbit which would go through a series of perturbations until eventually it either was ejected from the solar system or ended up in the asteroid belt. Looie496 (talk) 20:39, 13 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The problem is not that it is not possible. The problem is that it is highly unlikely. Dauto (talk) 21:55, 13 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I think some people here are trying to "move the mountain to Mohammed", as some put it (though I've heard that's not a legitimate Muslim story...) Think for a minute: what evidence do we have that the Earth was in its present orbit - or that Jupiter was in its present orbit, for that matter?  The exoplanet data we've been hearing about involves lots of stories of planets that must have formed one place and gone another.  And the Earth, having been big enough to clear an orbit before the collision, yet being struck so badly, must have been in some crazy elliptical orbit at one point, mustn't it? Wnt (talk) 05:09, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
 * You seem to be trying to come up with a way in which the Earth-Theia collision could have resulted in the asteroid belt, which is backwards thinking. You should be considering the asteroid belt and trying to think of a way it could have been formed. It being made up of planetesimals that never coalesced into a planet is a very simple explanation for pretty much everything we observe, so we don't need to look any further. --Tango (talk) 14:04, 14 July 2011 (UTC)