Tag Archives: Asteroids

Across the Universe: Relics of Space

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This entry is part of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column from The Tablet first ran there in September 2018… I have altered it slightly to bring it up to date. The famous American cynic H. L. Mencken once asserted that every question had an answer that was “neat, plausible, and wrong.” Science is no different. Our meteorite collections have reddish “ordinary” meteorites and black “carbonaceous” ones; meanwhile, in space we see some asteroids with reddish surfaces, while others are pitch black. The connection between the meteorites and the asteroids is thus neat and plausible. But is it right? The holy grail in asteroids is finding the ones with water and carbon. If we are going to be a space-faring species, we’ll need those chemicals to feed us and power our spacecraft. The cost to bring them up to space with us from Earth makes these materials far more valuable than platinum or gold.  We know that some carbonaceous meteorites have carbon and water; and they are distinctively black. … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Key to the Sea and Sky

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This entry is part 29 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in July 2007; we first ran it here in 2015.   In Alicante, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, a group of us planetary astronomers held a workshop [in 2007] on how asteroids respond to the massive collisions that can lead to their catastrophic disruption. Just north of us, in Valencia, sailors from Switzerland and New Zealand were vying for the America’s Cup. The connection between elegant million dollar yachts and exploding asteroids. is the equations of fluid dynamics. I’ve loved sailing since my childhood. I spent my summers capsizing sailboards on Lake Huron and my winters reading too much Arthur Ransome. As a student in the early 1970s I competed on MIT’s sailing team (the Charles River was indeed “dirty water” especially back then), and attended lectures in their ocean engineering department on the challenges of designing the best shape for a hull that could slip through the water with a minimum of friction while … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – April 30, 2019

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This entry is part 94 of 118 in the series In the Sky This Week

Mercury, Venus appear very low in the eastern sky just before sunrise – if seeing Mercury was a challenge last week, it will be even harder this week. The waning crescent Moon joins the two planets until May 3rd. Saturn, Jupiter and the star Antares appear southern sky early in the morning. In this image, I have the light pollution set to high – this is typically what I can see from a close suburb to Detroit. This is the same patch of sky seen from a dark sky site. Mars and the star Betelgeuse are low on the horizon after sunset; the winter constellations will soon be gone. M-109 – “Vacuum Cleaner Galaxy” Messier 109 (also known as NGC 3992) is a barred spiral galaxy exhibiting a weak inner ring structure around the central bar approximately 83.5 ± 24 million light-years[3]away in the constellation Ursa Major. M109 can be seen southeast of the star Phecda (γ UMa). – Wikipedia Where did the name “Vacuum Cleaner Galaxy” come from? It’s … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: False Economies

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This entry is part 60 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in March 2009, and first posted here in 2016 “Astronomers Are Just As Dumb As Economists” cried the headline on the “Business Insider” website. The author, Eric Falkenstein, who writes a blog on hedge funds and other mysteries of the universe, was reacting to an earlier editorial on the site which had complained of government officials who, they asserted, seemed to think that the current economic recession was “like a giant asteroid, something completely unrelated to our own doing that just happened to hit us.” But Mr. Falkenstein noted, “an asteroid hit it” is in fact a favorite explanation of planetary scientists for nearly every anomaly in the solar system. Mercury has an unusually iron core? An asteroid hit it, blasting off much of its rocky mantle. Venus spins far slower, and in the opposite sense, compared to the other planets? Blame an asteroid strike. A giant impact is the current favorite theory … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – January 29, 2019

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This entry is part 80 of 118 in the series In the Sky This Week

When I was in Tucson recently, I marveled at the lack of orange sky glow over the city – the night sky was beautiful, and you could see many more stars from within the Tucson city limits, than I can see living 24 miles north of Detroit. See my previous post about Light Pollution. Venus continues to move away from Jupiter in the southeastern predawn sky; a waning crescent Moon joins Venus and Jupiter on the mornings of Jan. 29-31. Several familiar constellations and bright stars appear in the east-southeastern sky after sunset. Mars appears high in the southwestern sky after sunset all week. Mars is a little getting higher, and drifting a little westward with each day. I haven’t touched on the sky seen from the southern hemisphere in a while, so here’s the southeastern sky at 11:00 PM as seen from Río Gallegos – far to the south in South America. Crux – the “Southern Cross” is visible, as is Rigel Kentaurus, … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Everything You Know Is Wrong

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This entry is part 43 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

’Oumuamua is not the only odd thing in the outer solar system… this column dates from November, 2004, in the Tablet, and was first published here in 2015. The latest news from out where Pluto orbits has brought to my mind that ‘60s satire of TV science shows, “Everything You Know Is Wrong.” Readers of this column may remember how surprised we were last spring [2004] to find an object, since named Sedna, orbiting nearly twice as far from the Sun as any previously discovered solar system body. That far away, it must be pretty big to reflect even the meager bit of sunlight that we see glancing off its surface; perhaps as big as Pluto itself? How big? That depends on how bright its surface is. We know from their motions how far away from the Sun (and us) Sedna and the other Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) lie. And we can measure how much light from them reaches our telescopes. … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: First scout

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This entry is part 5 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in November 2017 In the month after its discovery we were able to train some of the largest telescopes in the world on the new visitor to our solar system (that I wrote about here), a small body whose orbit indicates that it is had come to us from outside our own solar system. “We’ve been expecting for twenty years to find some body on an orbit like this,” explained Brett Gladman to me. He’s an astronomer at the University of British Columbia who specializes in the faint distant objects of our solar system. (I was visiting Vancouver in November 2017.) He wasn’t surprised that its path was almost perpendicular to the plane where our sun’s planets orbit. There’s no reason why it couldn’t come from any direction, since it is not tied to our system. He wasn’t surprised that it was small, barely visible to our biggest telescopes. “In space, collisions mean … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The Impact of Asteroids

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This entry is part 7 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in November 2016 When I first arrived at the Vatican Observatory, more than 20 years ago, I decided to take advantage of its extensive meteorite collection by doing a systematic measurement of meteorite densities. Why? Mostly because no one else had done it before; no one had ever had both the access to such a collection, and the time to make such a survey. (It’s taken more than twenty years, and the work continues.) Soon after I started publishing my first results, spacecraft began visiting the asteroids that were the source of these meteorites, measuring their densities as well. The first surprise was that the asteroids were far less dense than the meteorites derived from them… showing that the asteroids were not solid rocks but rather, loose piles of meteoritic rubble. Our meteorite data allows us to make specific, quantitative estimates of the actual rock and metal content to be found within a … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Spicy planet stories

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This entry is part 41 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in October, 2006. We first ran it here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015 Doing science has often been compared to reading a mystery novel; the hunger to know “whodunit” keeps us turning the pages. But what stops us from just skipping to the last page, and moving on to the next book? Perhaps a better metaphor is a spice cake. The real pleasure of the process lies in the spicy experience of wondering. Actually finding out is just the icing on the cake. At the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society, held earlier this month [2006] in Pasadena, California near the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), dozens of little slivers of spice cake were on offer. A wonderful little asteroid system, called 1999 KW4, passed within half a million kilometers of the Earth about five years ago; it’s taken that long to analyze the … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Souvenirs from Space

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This entry is part 39 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in October, 2004; it ran here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015 Typhoon 23 and I arrived in Japan on the same day. My mission (I can’t speak for the typhoon) was to attend an international workshop on sample returns from asteroids. Our hosts were the  scientists and engineers of  the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who are eagerly awaiting the arrival next summer of their spacecraft, Hayabusa, at asteroid Itokawa. (The remarkable challenges and eventually successes of Hayabusa can are described nicely at its Wikipedia site.) Astronomers usually have to be content with observing their objects from afar. But nothing beats actually going to a place to see what it’s really like. Itokawa is a potato-shaped lump of rock less than half a kilometer in diameter that apparently drifted into our neighborhood from the asteroid belt; though it looks like a typical asteroid, its orbit is not out beyond Mars but rather much … Continue reading →

Music Inspired by Astronomy, Part 1

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Music Inspired by Astronomy

Andy Fraknoi is a well-known astronomy popularizer and friend of Br. Guy Consolmagno. Andy has an astronomy education website, on which he has compiled the “New Annotated Catalog of 250+ Pieces of Music Inspired by Good Astronomy.” Andy’s music list is rather extensive, and is split into multiple astronomical categories; Andy also includes links to YouTube videos so you can listen to his music selections. I will post each category individually in a series, starting with asteroids: Gloria Coates Among the Asteroids on At Midnight (on Tzadik). A 1962 piece for string quartet, written for a production of The Little Prince; she has other music with science titles, so we took the liberty of including this. Kaija Saariaho Asteroid 4179: Toutatis (with The Planets by Holst, conducted by Simon Rattle, on EMI Classics CD). Short piece based on the complex rotational motion of this near-Earth asteroid. Brett Dean Komarov’s Fall (with The Planets by Holst, conducted by Simon Rattle, on EMI Classics CD). … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – May 22, 2018

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This entry is part 44 of 118 in the series In the Sky This Week

Jupiter has almost left the morning sky; Mars and Saturn are slowly making their way southward. I was a bit surprised to catch a flyover of the International Space Station when I copied this image from Stellarium! Jupiter is in the southeastern sky after sunset, and is a great observing target. The Moon The Moon is at first quarter on the 22nd, and then a waxing gibbous until full on the 29th. This whole week will be great for observing the moon through telescopes. The Moon is in the southwestern sky after sunset for the next few days. The Sun We have a spot! Active Region (AR) 2710 is rotating into view on the Sun – it’s so small it may be difficult to see through telescopes for a few days. AR2710 has a lot of coronal loop activity above it (left side of video), and coronal holes remain at both poles. Surprisingly, there are no Earthward facing coronal holes along … Continue reading →