Moon Survives Unprovoked Attack!

October 09, 2009

Internet traffic on blogs, YouTube, and discussion boards was nearly predicting the end of the world today.

It didn’t happen.

People warned that a missile launched by evil government scientists was going to plow into the virgin Moon and explode. The effects on Earth from disrupting the celestial harmony would be unpredictable but devastating: tsunamis, meteorite showers, volcanoes – and even more global warming.

What happened instead? Early morning news anchors were speechless at the NASA live TV feed. That’s because absolutely nothing was seen happening at the ground zero moment.

The Crater That Time Forgot

August 27, 2009

Erlanger crater, located at the moon's north pole, looks like a bottomless pit. That's because its floor is perpetually in pitch-black shadow. It's a place where sunlight hasn't fallen over 4 billion years. It would be a great place for aliens to stash a 2001-style monolith.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter made this eagle-eye photo as it swept over the moon’s north pole to look down on the gaping abyss.

At six miles wide, the lunar crater is coincidentally the diameter of  Crater Lake near Eugene, Oregon.

Imagine how eerie it would be to climb down into this crater and look up toward a star-saturated sky. The circumpolar constellation Draco the Dragon would wrap around the center of your field of view. The star Polaris and the bright star Vega would, farther out,  flank either side of Draco. The Mikly Way would arc high overhead.

The Real Visitors From Space

August 19, 2009

There was a lot of hubbub in the news this week about the British Ministry of Defense releasing declassified UFO reports from 1981 to 1996. Not coincidentally, sightings in Great Britain appeared to increase sixfold with the release of the 1996 space invasion movie Independence Day. But I’m not going to waste  bandwidth to give any further attention to this collection of  space-age fractured fairy tales.

Instead, last month a real interplanetary face-to-face encounter took place between two chunks of metal. One is the Mars rover Opportunity; the other is a 1,800-pound piece of iron. Both fell out of the sky onto Mars. The rover, back in 2004, the meteorite, 3 billion years ago.

Ignoring a Clear and Present Danger

August 13, 2009

Lost among other headlines this week -- the heated debated over government health care, the war in Afghanistan, a mid-air plane collision, and a 230-mpg automobile -- was a modest-sized news blub about the end of the world.

On Wednesday the National Academy of Sciences released a study reporting that NASA is inadequately funded to catalog potentially dangerous asteroids larger than a football stadium, whose orbits carry them near Earth. Congress was supposed to appropriate funds but didn’t, though they told the space agency to start the task four years ago.  NASA had to dig deep into its pockets to do some preliminary searches.

Telescopes Follow Mystery Jupiter Spot

July 22, 2009

 

Since I last reported on the strange spot that suddenly appeared on Jupiter last Sunday, it has been the “splat” or rather “splash” seen ‘round the world. 

An unknown interplanetary object did a “cannonball” by plunging into Jupiter’s atmosphere, disintegrating, and splashing debris above the cloud tops.

There was a sense of “déjà vu all over again” about this because it was exactly 15 years ago that I reported on a day-by-day basis the sequential impacts of over 20 fragments of comet Shoemaker Levy 9 that carpet-bombed Jupiter. A belt of dark bruise-looking features grew in the atmosphere following each subsequent impact.

Has a Comet Hit Jupiter?

July 19, 2009

This is a little too mystical for my tastes, but on the cusp of Walter Cronkite’s passing, and the Apollo 11 moon landing 40th anniversary, a mysterious dark spot has appeared on Jupiter.

The dark feature was first observed at approximately 13:30 universal time today by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley from his home observatory just outside Murrumbateman NSW Australia. Wesley photographed Jupiter through a 14.5 inch Newtonian reflector.

Science fiction fans will remember the closing chapters of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two when black alien monoliths began popping up in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The explanation for this one is a bit more down to Earth, per the observer’s posting tonight: 

“Preliminary image showing a black mark in Jupiters South Polar Region (SPR) which is almost certainly the result of a large impact - either an asteroid or comet - similar to the Shoemaker-Levy impacts in 1994.”

Let me caution that as of this writing the spot has not been reported being sighted independently by anyone else. Also, it is too near the pole to be a satellite shadow, and also moves with the planet’s rotation according to Wesley.

Beginning on July 20 1994, a string of comet pieces, from the breakup of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, bombarded Jupiter for nearly a week. Each fragment exploded in Jupiter’s atmosphere and blew black material above the cloud tops. Now, the new spot is reminiscent of the scars let behind by SL9 exactly 15 years ago.

The SL9 event was considered a once in 10,000-year spectacle. But individual comet or asteroid collisions may happen much more frequently on Jupiter. Prior to SL9 dark spots had been occasionally reported in Jupiter's atmosphere. But their origin was not understood. 

This will reinvigorate 2012 soothsayers that strange cosmic events are coming becasue of the end of the Mayan calendar. But for the rest of us more pragmatic observers, this unusual event will be followed closely by telescopes all over the world over the next few days. 

We Missed the Doomsday Comet by a Century

June 26, 2009

There is a lot of silly hoopla over the end of the ancient Mayan calendar and therefore supposed “end” of the world in 2012 according to some interpretations (such as a rogue comet whacking us). 

But let’s take a step back and consider a real event that happened to Earth when cosmic stuff really did hit the fan.

This Tuesday June 30 will be the 101st anniversary of the mysterious Tunguska explosion that flattened a forest in central Siberia with the equivalent of between 5 to 30 megatons of TNT detonating.

Comet-Kaze

February 01, 2009

My write-up about the “doomsday comet” last January 12th got more discussion going than any other post since my blog first went online.

This was quite a surprise to me. It could make a science writer downright cynical. Bubble-brained pseudo-science schlock sells! Hard core real science is, uh, ho-hum: no aliens, no mystical forces, no government conspiracies, no lost ancient civilization prophecies, and nothing as alluring as da Vinci Code-like riddles.

To recap, a mind-numbing concoction of screwball thinking -- which somehow ties together the so-called Bible Codes with Nostradamus and the end of the Mayan calendar --predicts a killer comet will raise havoc in late 2012. At the end of my blog I said that celestial visitations by comets were anything but predictable (with the exception of periodic comets like Halley’s comet).

Case in point. There’s a wild and crazy comet hurtling our way right now. It was first discovered in 2007 in the Lulin Sky Survey Project based in China – and hence is called comet Lulin.

It’s barreling across the plane of the solar system, called the ecliptic plane, where the orbits of all the major planets are arranged like racing car lanes.

This trajectory is unusual. Comets typically dive bomb the sun from all random inclinations to the ecliptic, like insects flitting around a streetlight.  Though it’s in the planet lanes, the comet is moving in the opposite direction of the orbits of the planets, like a racecar going backwards on a track. This retrograde motion is not unusual for a comet, but very rare when it’s in the ecliptic too.

The comet is zooming along on a parabolic trajectory, which means it may have never gravitationally interacted with the planets. This may be its first visit to the inner solar system. Call it virgin galactic (with apologies to the budding space-liner spinoff from Virgin Atlantic airlines.)

If comet Lulin were to smack into Earth it would be one hell of a wallop! It would be a head-on collision. But not to worry, at its closest approach on February 24 it will be about 60 million miles away.

Since comet Lulin will be moving opposite to the orbital motion of the Earth, it will appear to approach us and move away awesomely fast. At closest approach it will travel the angular width of the full moon every 2.5 hours! Through a small telescope you should be able to actually see it moving against the background of stars!

I’m sure my fellow astronomy enthusiast and Discovery Channel blogger Alan Dyer will have a lot more to say about this for backyard astronomers.

The comet has two tails that give the appearance of a pair of wings on some interstellar bird of prey. This is really an illusion produced by the fact the dust bleeding off the comet lies in a thin sheet and lags behind the comet. When see edge-on it look like an extra tail pointing in the opposite direction from the normal tail.

I’ve been following comets for decades but this on is certainly a weirdo.

Too bad you celestial prognosticators missed it!

Just to show you how cluttered the heavens are, last January 25th a newly discovered house-sized asteroid, called 2009 BD, whizzed within 400,000 miles of Earth. It will remain co-orbital with Earth through 2010 at a reasonable distance of 9 million miles, 36 times farther than the moon.

That’s something else the soothsayers missed.  But then again the number of potentially hazardous near Earth asteroids continues climbing as all-sky surveys – not prognostication -- track then down. Exasperated scientist say they are tired of announcing the “end of the world” every six months as more Earth clipping asteroids are cataloged.

My point here is that reality is much more exciting than some imaginary boogie-man doomsday comet that’s supposedly going to scare us in late 2012. Ho-hum.

Photo Credit: Paolo Candy, Cimini Astronomical Observatory

Artwork credit: NightSkyHunter