Travelers In The Night

Fireballs are meteors which become brighter than the planet Venus and can sometimes be seen in the daytime. If you are lucky to see a fireball send in your report to the American Meteor Society and become a citizen scientist.

For 16 years, since its discovery at Lowell Observatory, humans knew 1999 JD6 only as a strange, spinning, moving point of light in the night sky. It orbits the Sun once every 303 days on a path that brings it relatively close to Mercury, Venus, and Earth.  In the far distant future this small world is likely to collide with one of these planets, or the Sun, or be ejected completely from the solar system.  A RADAR movie made with a radio telescope reveals 1999 JD6 to be two asteroids in contact with each other giving the object a peanut shape.  Strangely enough 1 in 6 Earth approaching objects are like 1999 JD6 in that they are really two separate objects whose tiny forces of gravity keep them in contact as they orbit the Sun. 

To give you an idea of the asteroid traffic in our neighborhood, on a mostly cloudy night, through holes in the clouds, in a space of less than 2 hours, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski posted 7 new close approaching asteroid discoveries on the Minor Planet Center's Near Earth Object Confirmation Page.

Our everyday world is in the thin web of life that surrounds our planet. We see living organisms made possible by solar energy, water, air, and nutrients from the Earth. Maybe all living creatures are not in an environment similar to ours. When looking for life in other places in the Universe we can take some clues from living systems in extreme environments on our own planet.

Tonight, even though the chances are extremely slim, an asteroid hunter could find a sizable asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth. If we have decades warning, the potential impactor's arrival time could be changed by impacting the dangerous object with a high velocity mass or if we have less time we will need to nuke it which will either blow it to bits or give it a rocket like push.

Currently the majority of the Earth Approaching objects are found by my team, the Catalina Sky Survey or the Pan STARRs group in Hawaii. Both employ large telescopes, very expensive electronic cameras, and high powered computer systems.  However, an expert observer with a small 12 inch telescope and an electronic detector can still make interesting discoveries.

In the future one can envision a space mining family boarding a descendent of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Vehicle for a trip into low Earth orbit. A few hundred miles above the Earth's surface they would rendezvous with their asteroid mining spacecraft which will be their home for the next five years or so.

You can spot Europa with almost any small telescope as a moving point of light orbiting the planet Jupiter just like Galileo Galilei did 400 years ago. Of the 4 moons which you will see Europa is the one second closest to Jupiter.  

On December 25, 2017, while searching for Earth approaching asteroids in the constellation of Virgo, the Universe gave my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard a Christmas present in the form of a comet which now bears his name.

Since the dawn of our race, it is likely that humans have looked into the night sky and wondered if they are alone in the Universe on a unique planet. The NASA Kepler spacecraft has discovered more than a thousand planets orbiting distant stars. A newly discovered planet, Kepler-452b has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star. In the 4.5 billion years of the Earth's history the parade of more than 5 billion species has included single cell organisms, various multi cellular life forms, land plants, dinosaurs, mammals, birds, flowers, and humans to name a few. It is mind blowing to consider what kind of life forms might exist on a planet which is 1.5 billion years older than mother Earth.

Recent scientific studies have begun to shed light on the interesting mystery of how the small number of what we now call electrophonic meteors produce simultaneous light and sound. If you are lucky you could hear a meteor's dying whispers and could even be the first person to record these sounds on your cell phone.

The one thousand six hundred and second potentially hazardous asteroid was discovered by the Pan-STARRS group in Hawaii. Followup observations were made by  telescopes in Hawaii, France, Australia, Italy, Germany, and Pennsylvania. The Minor Planet Center used these vital observations to calculate an orbit and gave it the name 2015 OC22.

Long Winter nights with good seeing, from start to finish, are those on which the asteroid hunter makes new discoveries while being treated to views of millions of stars, gas clouds, and galaxies which inspire a child like sense of wonder.

At the few remaining natural night sky viewing locations on Earth the horizon has a faint glow in every direction.  Near the magnetic poles, this night glow appears to join with the relatively bright higher altitude aurora which covers larger portions of the sky and exhibits beautiful colors including green and red. Green light is the strongest component of the Earth' airglow and comes from oxygen atoms which have become energized by our Sun. 

When we find a planet which appears to have the chemical signs of living organisms in its atmosphere, the desire to take a close up look at it will be hard to contain. Laser propelled ultra light space probes could be sent to explore nearby worlds. The cost of investigating our planetary life hosting neighbors is likely to be less than what the US is planning to spend upgrading its nuclear weapons.

After 9 years, 3 billion miles, and 18 sleeping periods NASA gave a wake up call to the New Horizons when it was 135 million miles from the Pluto system.  After more than 8 hours of waiting, NASA engineers were ecstatic to receive a message from the New Horizons stating that "I am fine and ready to go forward with an encounter with Pluto".

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.