On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 8:08 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
The fact that both of these events happened so close together just does not > seem likely since both are infrequent. Talk of a miracle in cold fusion; > this seems like one in astronomy. > I suspect these events only seem infrequent, in two ways. First, because we personally aren't involved in monitoring all of the asteroids, large and small, coming through the local region of the solar system, and if we did, we might lose sleep at night (just a guess). Second, our ability to record such events is improving, and we might have lost a lot of data earlier on when the tracking of events was less systematic and accurate. An interesting challenge would be to independently work out the parameters of a model based on the Poisson distribution to calculate the likelihood and magnitude of similar events in the next few years. Eric
