What are these things?

They seem to be following a straight line and yet have a form that looks of manipulation?  The common acronym for these phenomena are NEOs.  And apparently some of them may have different origins than previously thought:

A new study using data from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope has traced some dark Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) back to their likely source – a family of large, low albedo asteroids known as the Euphrosynes.

The Euphrosyne asteroid family occupies a unique place in orbital element space among families, located in the outer main asteroid belt at very high inclination.

The asteroid after which they are named, 31 Euphrosyne is about 156 miles (260 km) across and is one of the ten largest asteroids in the belt.

Here is a bit more information on these particular objects and what may be manipulating their path currently, as well as in the future:

According to the authors of the study, this asteroid family may be the source of some of the dark NEOs found to be on long, highly inclined orbits.

“The Euphrosynes have a gentle resonance with the orbit of Saturn that slowly moves these objects, eventually turning some of them into NEOs. This particular gravitational resonance tends to push some of the larger fragments of the Euphrosyne family into near-Earth space,” said Dr Joseph Masiero of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, lead author of a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint).

And below is a related video discussing some of the concerns about an asteroid coming close to earth.  I’m not sure what camp to be in, but it may be interesting none the less.

thanks to sci-news.com for the great info

thanks to NASA and Cal Tech for the pic