Category Archives: astronomy

First Watson, Now Holmes

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As a headline, it’s a cheap link, I know, but it was irresistible. The point is that the comet Holmes suddenly got much brighter and is now beginning to do a naked eye display. How much brighter? It went from magnitude 17 to magnitude 2.8 over the course of a few hours. David Morrison (at NASA) who writes a newsletter about near earth objects (NEO) gives an analogy: “This is equivalent to the planet Saturn suddenly becoming as bright as the full moon.”

Before you go wild, based on this, know that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Orionids!

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[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:

Don’t forget the Orionids over the next night or two (peaking late tonight, the wee hours of Sunday morning). As the name implies, look for them coming from Orion, although even if you don’t know exactly where that is, you’ll see them almost anywhere you look in the sky if you’ve enough dark. Recall that Orion has those three bright equally spaced stars in a line, making up his belt. I spoke about this, and gave more directions about the Orionids in a post last year.

There’s a Space.com piece by Joe Rao with more discussion. About sightings, it says:

Expect to see few, if any Orionids before midnight – especially this year, with a bright waxing gibbous Moon glaring high in the western sky.

But moonset is around 1:30 a.m. local daylight time on Sunday, and that’s a good time to begin preparing for your meteor vigil. At its best several hours later, at around 5:00 a.m. when Orion is highest in the sky toward the south, Orionids typically produce around 20 to 25 meteors per hour under a clear, dark sky.

Today’s StarDate (as usual, read on NPR by the wonderful Sandy Wood) has a piece on it too. Here’s an extract from the transcript (written by Damond Benningfield):

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Massive!

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[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:

Messier 33 GalaxyThere’s been a recent discovery* of an unusual black hole. It is about sixteen times the mass of our sun. While this might not seem as dramatic as the black holes that are millions of times the mass of our sun that live at the cores of galaxies, such large black holes that result from the collapse of ordinary stars have hitherto been unknown. This presents an important and exciting puzzle about the processes by which black holes form from the collapse of stars. There’s evidently more going on than previously thought, possibly as a result of complicated interactions with its companion star during formation.

(Image: A Harvard-Smithsonian Center image of the galaxy Messier 33, in which the new black hole was found.)

I talk a bit more about this on Correlations, and you can read more about the recent […] Click to continue reading this post →

Dawn at Dawn

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Well, it is time for Round Two!

dawn spacecraft getting readyRecall that (as mentioned in my post with the doom-laden title) the Dawn mission was postponed by several months due to unfavourable launch conditions. Recall also that the celestial window for launching Dawn will not come again for another seventeen years, if it does not launch over the next couple of weeks or so! This is a bit scary therefore.

So the two week launch window is open, and Dawn is on the pad and ready to try to fly tomorrow, at around….. dawn. They’ve been preparing Dawn for this for a while now (you can see in the picture on the right some of the preparations – encasing it in the protective dressing for the rocket launch… I got this picture from this link and you can see more there), and from the press release of yesterday confirming that the mission is a “go”:

dawn spacecraft rendition“If you live in the Bahamas this is one time you can tell your neighbor, with a straight face, that Dawn will rise in the west,” said Dawn Project Manager Keyur Patel of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Weather permitting, we are go for launch Thursday morning – a little after dawn.”

Dawn’s Sept. 27 launch window is 7:20 to 7:49 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (4:20 to 4:49 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time). At the moment of liftoff, the Delta II’s first-stage main engine along with six of its nine solid-fuel boosters will ….

They also talk a bit about the science (also see later, below this): […]
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Monolith Not Spotted, Yet

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iapetus flyby image by cassiniDrat.

Well, maybe on the next flyby. Flyby page here. AP (via Yahoo) story by Alicia Chang here. Interesting extracts:

The international Cassini spacecraft went into safe mode this week after successfully passing over a Saturn moon that was the mysterious destination of a deep-space faring astronaut in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

..and intriguingly: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Origins of a Species-Killer?

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In case you missed this earlier this week, there was an intriguing detective science story that, if correct, has yielded remarkable news about the past of our planet, and of course, us. From an AP story by Richard Ingham (via Yahoo):

asteroid collision event simulationThe extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago can be traced to a collision between two monster rocks in the asteroid belt nearly 100 million years earlier, scientists report on Wednesday.

The smash drove a giant sliver of rock into Earth’s path, eventually causing the climate-changing impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and enabled the rise of mammals — including, eventually, us.

(Image above: Simulation images (AFP/HO/Don Davis) of the asteroid collision event, and the resulting extinction collision event on earth, and the collision with the moon.)

The scientists are William Bottke, David Vokrouhlicky and David Nesvorny, working at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. They traced the rock to a collision event that took place in the inner parts of the asteroid belt somewhere about between 140-190 million years ago, producing the family of fragments collectively called the Baptistinas, the largest being Baptistina 298. Over time, some of the fragments found […] Click to continue reading this post →

They’re Out There (Probably)

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alien from the movieLet’s talk about aliens. I don’t mean people coming across the borders of whatever your country happens to be (although I did giggle a decade ago when I was given an official “alien number” by the powers that be back then – though I always regretted bypassing the “alien with extraordinary ability” status that the O1 visa gives you), I mean living creatures from beyond planet earth (it’s also interesting to consider the possibility that the seeds for life on earth may also have come from elsewhere).

It’s one of my favourite topics to consider, which is why I like to follow a lot of the remarkable things we are learning about our neighbouring planets (and other bodies like moons, asteroids, comets, and, yes minor planets like our old friend Pluto), and of course the ever-increasing variety of extra-solar planets (the ones we are discovering orbiting other stars). Overall, it gives one the sense that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are not alone (to use the tired old phrase), which to me is tremendously exciting.

I think we’ll find lots of compelling evidence that there’s lots of simple life on other bodies relatively soon, and I think that when people on the street hear of this, they’ll find it interesting enough. But I suspect that this will completely different to an […] Click to continue reading this post →

Total Eclipse of the Moon

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nasa total eclipse informationHow come there’s no song with this as the title? Sung by someone with a gravelly voice…. (Sorry, semi-obscure ’80’s music reference.)

Anyway, yes, there is one later tonight (more properly, early in the morning on Tuesday). For West Coasters, the interesting phase starts at about 1:50am, and it’ll last for well over three hours, going total at 2:52am and coming out of total at 4:22am. Please make the appropriate adjustment for other timezones.

This is good news for me, as I’ve got eight hour jet-lag from flying back from England […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Scary Universe?

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Ok, there’s “The Elegant Universe”, and “The Ambidextrous Universe”…. even “Stephen Hawking’s Universe”… and so on for these titles. But how about “The Scary Universe” or “The Dangerous Universe”? (Personally, I wish we’d just stop with the whole “The fill-in-the-blank Universe” stuff, so I probably should have not written this first paragraph.)

Well, I myself don’t think of the Universe that way, but tonight (at 9:00pm) the History Channel will be presenting the next show in their series (called “The Universe”), which is about (they say) the Most Dangerous Place In The Universe”. It looks as though it will be a survey of various places where a lot of very energetic activity is taking place, powering some of the most powerful phenomena we’ve ever seen, such as quasars, magnetars, and so forth. So black holes will feature quite a bit, I imagine, and although I probably should not really be telling you about it before I’ve had a chance to see it (recall my remarks about the windy shooting conditions here), I think (I’m not sure) that I’ll be making an appearance as one of the contributors. (I did not get caught off guard this time.)

The whole “dangerous” motif is a sort of deliberately sensational way of presenting […] Click to continue reading this post →

Perseids!

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Over the next few nights, you should have a good chance of seeing some of the Perseid meteor shower. They’re going to put on a rather splendid show this year, I hear. From the NASA news site, I’ve grabbed a a diagram of the region of the sky (containing the constellation Perseus, of course – that’s where they’ll seem to be coming from, and so that’s what gives them their name) that you ought to be looking toward. (The red dot is not a star, but the central point of (apparent) origin, and the red lines are some example paths of the streakers that you’ll see):

perseids where to look

Concerned that you don’t know enough astronomy? No idea in any amount of detail […] Click to continue reading this post →