Travelers In The Night

When a fleet of interstellar spaceships leaves our solar system for a planet circling a nearby star the most important of all of the riches that human explorers will carry with them will be libraries of our planet's DNA and the seeds of plants. They are the connection between past life, the inorganic world, and future life.

Confronted with the deluge of new possible planets, in 2006, The International Astronomical Union voted to categorize Pluto as a Dwarf Planet and not the 9th planet in our solar system as most school children had learned. 

Intriguing features which change with the Martian seasons mimic flows of liquid water on the Earth's surface.

In 1933 Fritz Zwicky suggested that the high speeds of galaxies in the relatively distant Coma Cluster are indicative of some type of invisible material which is pulling on them. In the 1970's Dr. Vera Rubin began to measure the speeds of stars in galaxies using the Doppler shift. She expected stars orbiting at different distances from the centers of spiral galaxies to behave like the planets in our solar system since for these giant star systems the luminous mass that we observe is concentrated towards their centers.  To her amazement the stars near the edge of the great galaxy in Andromeda and many other spiral galaxies are moving at speeds which indicate that these galaxies contain ten times the amount of mass that emits radiation which is visible to us. It was at this point that Dr. Rubin realized that she had discovered compelling evidence to support Zwicky's dark matter hypothesis. 

The first alien object to observed visiting our solar system arrives from truly deep space and leaves us with the mystery of what it is and how it got that way.

Being night sky friendly means that you only use outdoor lighting fixtures which direct light onto the ground where humans need it and not up into the sky where it obscures the natural wonders of the Universe. Currently more than 2/3 of the US population and more than 1/2 of the those people living in Europe cannot see the Milky Way or a meteor streaking through the night sky because of inappropriate outdoor lighting. Amazingly enough being night sky friendly saves money and is good for business. 

Earth like planets are being discovered circling the most common type of star in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy.

Did you know that asteroids can bring diamonds to Earth and that asteroids sometimes create diamonds when they collide with our planet?

A small asteroid soars into the lonely space high above and below the plane of our solar system.

About 35 million years ago the Earth was impacted by two large asteroids creating the more than 50 mile diameter Popigai [pop a gay i] Crater in Russia and a similar crater in Chesapeake Bay in the USA.  Analysis of fragments indicate that the impacting objects were not made of the same material. This finding has led scientists to speculate that there may be an astronomical process which changes conditions in the inner asteroid belt and causes the Earth's orbit to change slightly.  This combination could have triggered the ice age which caused the first significant ice sheet in Antarctica to form and led to the last major extinction event in the Earth's history.

Perhaps the reason that we have not detected alien civilizations on distant worlds is because they exist in oceans covered by miles of radiation absorbing ice and rocks.

In February 2013 a space rock about 59 feet in diameter entered the Earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia making a fire ball 30 times brighter than our Sun. It came without warning and nearly 1,500 people were injured primarily by flying glass from broken windows. In the end spending a billion dollars a year on asteroid damage prevention is like purchasing expensive insurance for an extremely unlikely event. However, it has a side benefit that it will employ people and may stimulate science and technology.  

A rock from another solar system is likely to have streaked by Earth before heading back into interstellar space.

There are more than 20,000 pieces of space junk larger than 4 inches in diameter and millions of tiny ones in orbit around the Earth.  At orbital speed a flake of paint carries as much energy as a 550 pound object traveling at 60 miles per hour.  Eventually all of this stuff will fall back to Earth.   So far no injuries or property damage has been confirmed.  Heads up.

On it's gravitational leash, Earth's pet space rock, 2016 HO3, accompanies us at a distance of between 38 and 100 times the Moon's distance from Earth as we both travel about the Sun.

For 43 years after its discovery in 1949, the Earth approaching asteroid Icarus, was known as the object which passes closest to our Sun. It is named for a boy in Greek mythology whose wings of feathers and wax melted when he ignored his father's advice and flew too close to the Sun.  

To survive on Venus where the temperature is 864F and the surface air pressure is 90 times that of Earth, NASA and JPL engineers are exploring the concept of avoiding the use of modern temperature sensitive electronics by creating a fully mechanical rover.

Using the long arm of the internet, astronomers in Russia are observing with a telescope located near Mayhill, New Mexico to discover solar system objects. The New Mexico Skies Observatory, near the village of Mayhill, is located 7,300 feet above sea level and has world class, clear dark skies, ideal for astronomical viewing. In addition to discovering new objects the ISON-NM telescope is being used to determine the size and shape of asteroids by carefully measuring the light they reflect as they spin on their axis of rotation and move about the Sun.  The size, shape, and rate of spin of an asteroid is the kind of information which humans need to prepare for the unlikely situation that a small body is found to be on a collision course with planet Earth.

What at first appeared to be an asteroid turned out to be a double comet.

Juno was found by German astronomer Karl L. Harding in 1804 who noticed that to the human eye it appeared to be a star like moving point of light in the night sky.  The light that Juno reflects suggests that it could be the source of stony meteorites called chondrites that we find on Earth.