While all eyes were on the nonevent taking place in the Hudson Valley of New York (and elsewhere), there was quite the show taking place above that taunting canopy of clouds.
That’s right, I’m talking about the flyby of Asteroid 2004 BL86.
This little world blasted past our very own Earth and if you were lucky and had the right viewing opportunities, you could see it. I’d been hoping for a clear sky, as I’d been itching to take the new Celestron out behind the garage and see what I could see. Alas, it wasn’t to be – clouds with a tiny sprinkling of snow dropping from them – but that hasn’t stopped my fascination with BL86.
Take a look at the NASA/JPL film I’ve enclosed with this blog, as well as this excellent link from the same source. BL86 is a round asteroid with its own munchkin moon, which I find utterly charming. That moon isn’t much larger than our back yard, and here it is, making a name for itself while partnering with BL86 as it graces our solar system. True, it came within 745,000 miles/1.2 million kilometers of the Earth. That only means it stayed far away enough to mind its own business yet close enough to give us a good flirt and a wink.
Can you imagine if you were one of the inhabitants of that tiny world? How your view changes as the days whirr past while zipping through the solar system. It’s almost as if it’s shouting “wheee!” as it goes on its tilted orbit around the sun, waving hello every now and again.
If you have enough patience to wait until 2027, there might be a second opportunity to see yet another asteroid, 1999 AN10, grace our planet with its near presence. It, too, is expected to pass rather close…and raising the inevitable alarms that it has the potential to blast us out of existence.
Ah well.
Until then, keep your eyes to the skies, and always continue to be surprised!
Lately in the news there’s been a lot of buzz about the Orion rocket.
This post, however, is about the constellation and, unlike the rocket, is already in space and will be there pretty much forever, although with the passage of time, he’ll look a little different. But that’s a whole ‘nother topic for another time.
Winter’s chilly skies offer an excellent opportunity to view this bright constellation. When he rises in the east, he almost looks as if he’s climbing a hill, until he reaches the midheavens, and then he starts his journey back down into the west. Right now’s the best time to see him, and he’ll be up right until spring.
Orion’s got plenty of company, too. In his patch of the sky, some of winter’s brightest stars and constellations gather in his neck of the woods. His shoulder (pictured in the upper left hand star in the above rectangle) is Betelgeuse, and his lower right hand foot is Rigel. You can trace a hexagon going up to the right and a touch north to the “V” shape that is the head of Taurus, and the brightest star in the “V” is Aldebaran. Next, cast your eyes up and over slightly left and you’ll come to Capella, the eye of the charioteer Auriga. Going left in almost a straight line, you’ll come to the stick figure twins, whose heads are Castor and Pollux, which are actually the Gemini twin’s names. Next, drop your gaze a little south and to the left and you’ll come to Procyon,the very bright star of Canis Minor, or, the Little Dog. But his big brother, Canis Major, or Big Dog, hosts the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. His basic shape is also a thinner rectangle, and you can easily find Sirius if you trace a southwest path using Orion’s belt as a pointer.
Credit: Dave Snyder
Even if you have trouble finding each of these stars on the first try, you’ll notice that this section of the evening sky stands out more than others, and if you go to this site, you’ll find an explanation and some tips on locating these and other favorites.
But wait – there’s more!
A constellation as grand as Orion simply won’t stop at dominating the winter sky. It’s what’s inside him that makes him even more fascinating.
Look at the picture above and you will see an “N” in the lower half of Orion’s depiction. That’s the Orion Nebula, and although a bit faint, on a clear winter night you should be able to make out a tiny hazy patch. Even with typical field glasses the details of it come out clearer. What makes that nebula so remarkable is what it contains. A solar system nursery is there, wherein a collection of youthful stars and planets in the forming stage are present. The New York Times has an excellent articleand a wonderful video detailing the action swirling around in Orion’s belt.
So don’t just sit there! Put on a jacket, go outside and look up – you’ll be rewarded with heavenly treasure, free and yours for the taking.
Yes, I’ll admit I’m a geek. I married one, too. So of course we felt it necessary to see “Interstellar.” We read up on it, exchanged speculations on the theories behind it, compared different viewpoints, opinions, reviews, all of that. After all of this effort, a sensible decision was cast to go and see it, already.
So last night, after first ducking into Target to purchase some chocolates to stick into our pockets so we wouldn’t have to pay the ridiculous price of $4.oo for a $1.oo candy bar, we went. It was great to go into a theatre filled with our kinds of people, equally geeky and completely silent during the showing, with only the rare murmur of approval over a spectacular scene.
Naturally, we weren’t disappointed. Both of us loved it and spent the ride home discussing it. And I could go on about this, that or the other thing regarding the vagaries of space-time travel and the physics behind it.
Why would I? You know all that anyway.
What got me were the small touches, the little hints of things to come and viewpoints either behind the characters or the writers who invented them. First on my list were the books on the shelves in Murph’s bedroom. How many of you took a good look at them? Here’s two that caught my immediate attention: “The Stand” and “Outlander.”
“Outlander” caught my eye because Diana Gabaldon wrote this book regarding a portal that transports a woman through time, and Stephen King’s “The Stand” because the human race is nearly killed off in that one. Both of those elements were the story in “Interstellar.”
Actually, books do figure prominently in the movie. Take, for example, the school district’s reliance on “corrected versions” of history. The moonwalk was all propaganda to economically bankrupt the Soviet Union. After all, the Soviets never made it to the moon, so that propaganda campaign must have worked. Yet Murph refuses to believe it all and listens to her father, who reinforces the truth.
All that talk about chemical compositions and how it affects environments and circumstances also gave me the goosies. The way how too much nitrogen in an atmosphere isn’t ideal or any atmosphere’s makeup is so sensitive to various forms of life made me smile.
But really, when you get right down to it, the use of time as a resource and element defined the film. Everything from the father Cooper as a younger man visiting his daughter Cooper as she lay dying, much older than he (all right, how many of you also knew that was Ellen Burstyn?), to the astronaut left behind for 23 years when Brand and Cooper seemed to be gone only minutes? Or the gradual shift of Earth from viable to slowly dying, which seemed to take both an interminable and finite amount of time?
I could go on about many, many more things about why we enjoyed “Interstellar” so much, but that would take time, so if you haven’t seen it, take the time and go!
The New York Times had an excellent article on the possibilities of life Out There. You know, all that space that the universe occupies. According to Carl Sagan, there was no reason not to expect life that was comparable to humans. But if you asked the competition, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, we were it. Sure, it was reasonable to expect primordial soup in other locales, with perhaps a few vegetables thrown in for variety, but Mayr was steadfast in his beliefs that the chances for humanlike life anywhere but here was slim to nil.
Naturally, there’s also that school of belief that attests to aliens living among us, including the abductees who’ve been tested and probed. Those unexplained sightings of strange ships hovering over dark highways in remote locations – that can’t be fake, eh? There has to be something real under Area 51, right? After all, why do they protect it so fiercely?
If you ask me, I’d bet the rent on life existing outside our little blue dot. Compare it to the lottery. The higher the stakes, the more players become involved. Eventually, a number’s picked and a winner is paraded before cameras as the newest bazillionaire. On occasion, though, there’s more than one winner, and regularly three or four. I’m no mathematician, but what are the chances that several people will bounce into the local gas station, drop $20.00 on gas and another $3.00 bucks for a few Powerball tickets and all come out winners? It happens. So why not expect life on other planets?
Carl Sagan maintained that sound waves generated from TV and radio drifted out among the stars would signal to intrepid space voyagers our existence. That was detailed in Contact. Those sound waves possess properties that cause them to stretch and grow as they wander further from their source. By the time those waves are detected, what discernible information remains attached to these signals would be challenging to interpret. But then again, the right exoplanetary scientist might find them an intriguing prospect: thin signals meaning what? A project to research, to turn heads into another direction to discover their source? Our planet, uncovered at last?
What’s to say there isn’t a planet with inhabitants who share the dreams of finding others, only to be told the possibilities are so incredibly remote it isn’t worth a bother?
Here’s how I see it: out there, far from Earth, a soul ponders what bioforms rose and prospered elsewhere in the abyss of space. Technologically advanced to send out space probes, this soul launches a machine capable of seeking clues, if not evidence. Time passes, the soul dies, but other scientists take this soul’s place and keep on with the vigil. Eventually, the machine wanders so far away from its home planet that even its trail of crumbs grows cold. After a great deal of time, the machine is lost to memory and passes into legend, but the language on the foreign planet evolves to the point where even the legend transforms into a mystery and eventually forgotten. Meanwhile, life on that planet succumbs to its own evolution as its inhabitants face other issues that seem more pressing or trivial, but interest in further explorations has shriveled as it’s become necessary to focus on the lack of rain, food, or a dwindling resource that is elemental to the stability of life on said planet. Or, life for the other planet’s inhabitants is fulfilling, and therefore interest plummets because all needs are met and exceeded. Curiosity fades as the inhabitants indulge in The Good Life and place high importance cultivating perpetual happiness.
On a peaceful September morning, blue skies except for drifting patches of cumulus clouds, a flash streaks across the sky. Whatever caused it crashes into a suburb of a medium-sized city, resulting in a fair amount of damage to both the landscape and the object. Upon cautious examination, its solid core leads Earth scientists to believe it’s not merely silicon. Placed in the hands of a particularly observant scientist, a barely imperceptible vibration reveals a secret only a sensitive hand would notice. “Hey,” says the Earth scientist, “I think we got something here…”
No alien spaceships, no apocalyptical force, only a simple device, badly damaged and time-worn, offers a clue to a glorious civilization similar to our own, whose own culture is seemingly lost to the wastelands of space and disbelieving souls.
Used to be that naming planets was a fairly simple task. The Ancients looked up towards the skies, observed that a handful of stars travelled across the sky (and, in fact, planet means “wanderer”) and gave them a suitable name that reflected what they saw.
For example, Mars, glowing red in the heavens, was named for the Roman god of war. And it wasn’t just the Romans who considered this planet the embodiment of conflict and challenges, many cultures and their languages also saw fit to give it this distinction. The Greeks called it Ares, Hindus call it Mangela, Hebrews call it Ma’adim, in Sanskrit it is known as Angaraka, and in Babylon one would notice the rising and setting of Nergal.
With the advent of stronger telescopes, more planets within our solar system were discovered, though not bright enough to spot with the unaided eye (mostly – if you know where to look on an incredibly clear night in the middle of a very dark, dark field with absolutely no chance of any interfering light from any source, you might see Uranus, but that depends on other conditions, too). I’ve seen Jupiter’s four bright moons, through a telescope but with my own eyes, too (but you have to cover up Jupiter with a magazine to see them; it’s much less of a challenge to spot them even with birding binoculars or a decent pair of opera glasses).
Nowadays, we have a problem of riches. Thanks to the hard work of astronomers, astrophysicists and others trained to observe the telltale signs of wobble and movement, there are over a thousand planets at our disposal. Sure, they’re ridiculously far away and chances are you’ll never see any of them though your backyard reflector. But you might see the star they’re rotating, and imagine what kind of life lives upon these exoplanets, as they’re called.
Do you want to blow your mind? The New York Times has an amazing interactive graphic that’ll keep you busy for hours. I can’t even find the words to describe how amazing this chart is, but if you check it out, make sure you scroll down to the end. I won’t give away what’s there, except you’ll gasp and say, “hmm! The ones found are the result of NASA’s Kepler mission that have confirmed planets rotating around stars. If you click on some of the graphics on the above link, up will come information about the planet and its sun.
Of course, it’s impossible to find appropriate names for this batch that seems to be growing daily. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been attempts. The International Astronomical Union is sponsoring a contest for that very purpose. Have any ideas? Here’s your chance to honor a hitherto anonymous planet with a memorable, catchy handle, just as you would a baby.
Trouble is, what would the inhabitants of said world think?
There’s a brisk business in the sci-fi fiction world wherein writers devise plots regarding worlds thousands of millions of light years yonder, only reachable by wormholes or imagination. At the same time, astronomers here on earth keep their eyes stuck to their favorite observing instrument of choice seeking out new planets, and, because there appears to be an obvious lack of wormholes (or so I believe; I could be wrong), they use their imaginations to conceive images of what these new worlds would look like.
On Independence Day, I sat on the porch of my parents’ house (so hard still to visit and not see my mother there) and flipped through the offerings on Endgadget. A posted article entitled, “The first potentially habitable alien planets we ever found – might not actually exist,” written by Richard Lawler caught my attention. In it, he writes about Gliese 581g, a planet orbiting Gliese 581, a star located in the constellation Libra. What made Gliese 581g so intriguing is its location in the “Goldilocks zone,” so called because it’s the correct distance from its sun to possess a moderate temperature for liquid water – not too hot or cold. It had also been determined that the planet didn’t spin on its axis and one side was perpetually in the dark. Artists created imaginative drawings, dreaming up visions of what this planet could look like.
Alas, it appears to have been all for naught. Spectrographic readings taken from Gliese 581 now indicate that 581g might actually not exist. How is that possible? The short answer is that the very signals that determined a planet might be located in a particular place also can be attributed to another source, say, “space stuff.” What would have produced a signal for the spectrometer to read no longer exists. It faded. Disappeared. Or, alternatively, may have been misread.
What a delicious idea for a plot.
Take it from the 581g’s point of view. Of course, that wouldn’t be the name of the planet. In my head, it’d be more like Ulele or Onodon – a whispery moniker reminiscent of mystery and exotica. For millennia the habitants, fiercely protective of their unique home, shrouded their visibility because of a unique feature Ulele/Onodon hosts. A signal accidentally launched by a careless Uleleian/Onodonite as it lit its cigarette on a rations replenish break, triggers a spectrograph that sits in the Earth lab of Dr. Jill Jackson, a red-headed ball of fire pouncing on a grand opportunity to stake her position as the sharpest astrophysicist in the universe. Having maxed out her credit cards and on the brink of credit collapse, she aims for the Nobel Prize and its generous financial reward and reveals her discovery to fellow scientists. Unbeknownst to her, the Ulele/Onodons are hot on her trail, thanks to sensitive instruments tuned to the merest hint of detective devices such as the one Dr. Jackson uses, and seek revenge…but not before re-cloaking their planet. Vowing to hunt her down like an unwanted cockroach in a Harlem apartment, Ulele/Onodon Fowler Falx is hot on her trail, and won’t stop until she’s obliterated and vanishes from view…just like 581g.
See, that explanation is much more entertaining than, “We thought we saw something…honest!…but it just…disappeared. Or, a similar incident as detailed above really happened and no one will admit it, because as any watcher of any sci-fi series involving space generally hide evidence regarding alien encounters. Since the jury is out on aliens’ actual existence, I’d like to seize this celestial development and give it a life, thicken its plot and give it hope for the future.
Keep your eyes to the skies, folks. The universe is filled with enigmas.
Moon, Stars and Beyond 