Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

Best of the Web: Ireland: Search on for 'Huge' Meteorite


Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ)
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:58 UTC
Meteor
© RTÉ NewsAstronomy - A meteor streaks across the sky during a meteorite shower in Spain.

The search is on for fragments of a meteorite which blazed across Irish skies yesterday evening.

The meteor - described as 'huge' by Astronomy Ireland - is known as a fireball.

Astronomy Ireland says it is likely to be a piece of a comet or asteroid that passed near Earth's orbit sometime in the past.

It appeared in the moonlit sky at approximately 6pm, or shortly after.

If it survived the fall to Irish soil, keen treasure hunters may fetch hundreds of Euro per gram of meteorite if found.
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Meteor

UK: Meteorite May Have Caused Earth to Move in 'Big Bang'

Leanne Ehren
Cambridge News, UK
Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:42 UTC
A ground-trembling incident has left residents in a market town asking whether a meteorite had landed nearby.

Hundreds of residents in Saffron Walden and surrounding villages reported incidents of houses shaking, windows rattling and furniture moving at about 8pm on Sunday when two loud bangs were heard.

Suggestions have been made that it could have been an earthquake, a meteorite or a plane crash - but the mystery still remains unexplained.

A full-scale operation was launched by the emergency services after residents in Saffron Walden, Thaxted, Ashdon and Newport reported hearing the bang and experiencing a trembling - but nothing was found.

Residents as far away as Haverhill, Castle Camps and Great Sampford contacted the News, reporting their beds moving, houses shaking and loud thuds.

Police from Stansted and Dunmow were drafted in to search the area along with firefighters.

Caroline Mifsud, 37, from Saffron Walden, said: "My son heard an explosion and felt a shake and about 10 minutes later there were police and fire engines everywhere. Everyone is talking about it on Facebook."
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Meteor

The Reality of Near Earth Objects

JD Adams
Salem News
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:44 UTC
Image
© Andrew C. Steward'Near Earth Object Impact Hazard
From 'The End', written by Jim Morrison of The Doors

"Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again"

The Earth has been a stage where countless scenes have played out from a script that was written by fate. Every form of life will have its time in the sun, until changing conditions allow new species to reign.

When dinosaurs roamed unchallenged, ancestral mammals were insignificant creatures that scurried about in the shadows, biding their time. Then a meteor impact 65 million years ago brought the curtain down on the age of dinosaurs, and opened the door for mammals to thrive and evolve into beings that could reach out for the stars. Scientists have had to accept the fact that such catastrophic impacts have been a regular occurrence in our history.

In our Human world we have created knowledge of chemistry, biology, history, and art. We have dedicated our lives to solving philosophical challenges and attempted to separate right from wrong. But we have perhaps mislead ourselves into believing that these things have enduring substance that will protect us from the realities of the universe. Another player will one day move onto the horizon of humankind, something so deceptively powerful that we can scarcely believe that in the span of a day, everything that we hold so dear could be gone, to disappear like the Gardens of Babylon under the sands of time.
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Meteor

Asteroid Flyby: Newly Discovered 2011 AN52 Passes Inside Moon's Orbit


SpaceWeather.com
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© JPL
Newly-discovered asteroid 2011 AN52 is flying past Earth today just inside the orbit of the Moon (0.8 LD).

The space rock is only 8 meters wide, about the size of a small room, so even experienced amateur astronomers will have trouble photographing it as it zips through the northern constellations Draco and Cygnus glowing like an 18th magnitude star. But it is there: 3D orbit, ephemeris.
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Meteor

SOTT Focus: Comet Elenin is Coming!

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Sott.net
Sun, 16 Jan 2011 12:57 UTC
One of the members of our research team is an astronomer at a large observatory. We've been having a number of exchanges about the theories of James McCanney. Unfortunately, I can't find any really good videos of McCanney talking about his ideas. I did find the following which are basically just audio with minimal graphics. They do explain his ideas so have a listen before you continue on. If anybody has links to better videos, please let me know!


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Hourglass

Cometary Impact on Neptune: Herschel Data Point to Collision About Two Centuries Ago


ScienceDaily
Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00 UTC
Science daily Neptuen
© NASATwo centuries ago a comet may have hit Neptune, the outer-most planet in our solar system.
A comet may have hit the planet Neptune about two centuries ago. This is indicated by the distribution of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere of the gas giant that researchers -- among them scientists from the French obser-vatory LESIA in Paris, from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Re-search (MPS) in Katlenburg-Lindau (Germany) and from the Max Planck Insti-tute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching (Germany) -- have now studied. The scientists analyzed data taken by the research satellite Herschel, that has been orbiting the Sun in a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers since May 2009. The research is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics (July 16, 2010).

When the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter sixteen years ago, scientists all over the world were prepared: instruments on board the space probes Voyager 2, Galileo and Ulysses documented every detail of this rare incident. Today, this data helps scientists detect cometary impacts that happened many, many years ago. The "dusty snowballs" leave traces in the atmosphere of the gas giants: water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocyanic acid, and carbon sulfide. These molecules can be detected in the radiation the planet radiates into space.

In February 2010 scientists from Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research discovered strong evidence for a cometary impact on Saturn about 230 years ago (see Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 510, February 2010). Now new measurements performed by the instrument PACS (Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer) on board the Herschel space observatory indicate that Neptune experienced a similar event. For the first time, PACS allows researchers to analyze the long-wave infrared radiation of Neptune.
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Meteor

Best of the Web: Catastrophist Theories of Life Gaining Ground: It Came From Outer Space

Barry James
The New York Times
Thu, 23 Aug 2001 00:00 UTC
They're called catastrophists, a group of British scientists who question many of the aspects of Darwinian evolution and argue that life on Earth and the geology of the planet have been constantly reshaped by asteroid strikes and other external shocks.

The latest sally from the catastrophist camp comes from the astronomer and mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe, who told a scientific congress in California in July that he had found microbes in air samples scooped up by a balloon flying 25 miles (about 40 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.

Mr. Wickramasinghe, director of the department of Astrobiology at Cardiff University in Wales, said it was the first positive identification of extraterrestrial microbial life outside the atmosphere. The fact that a major British university has set up a department dedicated to a theory still regarded with much skepticism and hostility in the academic community is one indication of how accepted catastrophist ideas have become in British science.
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Meteor

There is danger in the sky: Sodom and Gomorrah 'destroyed by a comet', say astronomers

Geoffrey Lean
The Independent
Sun, 30 Mar 1997 12:25 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Sodom and Gomorrah may have been destroyed by debris from a comet, startling new archaeological and astronomical research suggests. Another bombardment from space may have brought on the Dark Ages.

The research, to be presented to a conference at Cambridge University this summer, provides dramatic evidence for an extraterrestrial cause for the wholesale collapse of several civilisations around 2200BC.

The conference, on natural catastrophes during Bronze Age civilisations, will bring together astronomers, archaeologists, geologists and other scientists to try to find an explanation for the near-simultaneous fall of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, the Sumerian civilisation in Mesopotamia and the Harrapin Civilisation of the Indus Valley. In all, some 40 cities are thought to have disappeared, in a series of catastrophes.

Astronomers calculate that the Earth is bombarded by a particular dense storm of meteorites over a couple of centuries every 2,500 years - the last two blitzes would have occurred around 2200-2000BC and 400-600AD.
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Meteor

Move Over Global Warming, Let's Talk About Global Catastrophes

Susan Duclos
Digital Journal
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 05:00 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The Global Catastrophic Risks conference started yesterday morning and death by asteroids, comets and gamma ray bursts was on the agenda as experts discussed the statistical likelihood of these types of global catastrophes.

First up at the conference on Global Catastrophic Risks was the topic of asteroids, with David Morrison who is a NASA senior scientist. He spoke about the threat of a catastrophic asteroid strike and the Spaceguard Survey.

It is NASA's responsibility since 1998, to monitor the skies and detect near Earth asteroids that are larger than 1 kilometer in size, which is the size that, if it hit Earth, could end civilization.

Morrison stated that 80 percent of the near Earth asteroids that are 1 kilometer or larger have been identified and that he could assure those gathered at the conference that "We are not going the way of the dinosaurs." He also says the Spaceguard Survey has not turned up any near Earth asteroids as large as the one that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

Comment: No need to wait till the end of this century, as "one of man's important mistakes, one which must be remembered, is his illusion in regard to his I. Man such as we know him, the 'man-machine,' the man who cannot 'do,' and with whom and through whom everything 'happens,' cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago. " ~ G I Gurdjieff

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Meteor

Best of the Web: 25 Sun-Diving Comets in 10 days?

Dr. Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:42 UTC
The sun has just experienced a storm - not of explosive flares and hot plasma, but of icy comets.

"The storm began on Dec 13th and ended on the 22nd," says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC. "During that time, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) detected 25 comets diving into the sun. It was crazy!"

Sundiving comets - a.k.a. "sungrazers" - are nothing new. SOHO typically sees one every few days, plunging inward and disintegrating as solar heat sublimes its volatile ices. "But 25 comets in just ten days, that's unprecedented," says Battams.


"The comets were 10-meter class objects, about the size of a room or a house," notes Matthew Knight of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. "As comets go, these are considered small."

SOHO excels at this kind of work. The spacecraft's coronagraph uses an opaque disk to block the glare of the sun like an artificial eclipse, revealing faint objects that no Earth-bound telescope could possibly see. Every day, amateur astronomers from around the world scrutinize the images in search of new comets. Since SOHO was launched in 1996, more than 2000 comets have been found in this way, an all-time record for any astronomer or space mission.

Battams and Knight think the comet-storm of Dec. 2010 might herald a much bigger sungrazer to come, something people could see with the naked eye, perhaps even during the day.

"It's just a matter of time," says Battams. "We know there are some big ones out there."
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