Only the West Coast of North America was represented in our Virtual Star Party this week. We had astronomers in Oregon, California and Nevada. But we also a great night, with dozens of observed objects, including Comet 168P/Hergenrother.
We hold our Virtual Star Party every Sunday night when it gets dark on the West Coast, and broadcast live on Google+. Circle the Virtual Star Party page on G+ to get a notification of the event.
It was a slow week on Space news except for the massive announcement that an ancient riverbed was discovered on the surface of Mars. We took a look at this as well as the historic 55th anniversary of Sputnik, a precise measurement of the expansion of the Universe, and more!
We had another fantastic Virtual Star Party Sunday night, with a packed crew of astronomers, including a new face: Bill McLaughlin, streaming from Oregon.
Many many objects joined the party including: Andromeda, Cave Nebula, Pacman Nebula, Double Star Albiero, Wizard Nebula, Cat’s Paw Nebula, Veil Nebula, North America Nebula, Double Cluster, and more.
Mike Phillips was already an accomplished planetary astrophotographer, but he took everything to the next level with this amazing video of Jupiter. In order to create these 8 seconds of awesomeness, Mike filmed Jupiter for a consecutive 1.5 hours on September 12, 2012. Then he batched up groups of frames and stacked them together to pull out even higher resolution. Then he stitched the whole thing back together to create a video that shows off Jupiter’s rotation.
Just stacking up video to create a single image is difficult work, but doing this kind of animation really takes things to the next level. And Mike’s just getting started. Once Jupiter reaches opposition, he thinks he’ll be able to get a full rotation of the giant planet.
You might want to check out Mike’s post on Google+, where he responds to other astrophotographers explaining his technique. Mike has also promised a tutorial… that would be nice.
One of the commentartors, Thad Szabo, noted:
I didn’t realize you had constructed your own version of Voyager and gotten launch capability…
Wait… you shot this from Earth’s surface???
Exactly.
Mike shot the video of Jupiter through his home made f/4.5 14″ Newtonian telescope
In this week’s Virtual Star Party, we took a last peek at some objects low on the horizon, and then concentrated our efforts on the beautiful Autumn skies. We were able to see gorgeous views of the Moon and the Sun at the same time, as well as the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, the Ring Nebula, the Propeller Nebula, the Veil Nebula, the Cave Nebula, the Dumbbell Nebula and several other double stars and other clusters. We had at least 7 telescopes streaming live, so there was lots to see.
We broadcast these Virtual Star Parties live from Google+ every Sunday night, once it gets dark on the West Coast. If you’ll like to be notified of future events, circle the Virtual Star Party page. Then you’ll get an invite to our event each week.
Twitter is all abuzz with sightings of a huge fireball meteor that streaked across the skies Friday night at approximately 22:00 UTC. There are reports from Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Central England.
I’m going to link a bunch of videos so you can check out the event from multiple angles, but I want to make a completely unscientific judgement: it kind of looks like a re-entering spacecraft. Take a look at what the Jules Verne spacecraft looked like when it came back into the Earth’s atmosphere. See how it broke up into all those pieces? And don’t let anyone fool you with this picture. It was taken about 3 years ago in the Netherlands.
Once again, it’s time for the Weekly Space Hangout – our round up of all the big space news stories that you should be aware of. This week we talked about the following interesting stories in space and astronomy:
When a mountain-sized asteroid struck the deep ocean off the coast of Antarctica 2.5 million years ago, it set off an apocalyptic chain of events: a devastating rain of molten rock and then a deadly tsunami that inundated the coastlines of the Pacific Ocean. But according to a team of Australian researchers, this was just the beginning. Then came a protracted ice age that killed off many of the Earth’s large mammals.
The Eltanin meteor, named after the USNS Eltanin which surveyed the area in 1964, is the only impact that has ever been discovered in a deep-ocean basin. These deep water impacts must be more common – so much of the planet is ocean – but they’re tricky to find because of the inaccessible depths of the impact craters. Researchers examining sediments in the area discovered tiny grains of impact melt and debris from meteorite fragments. Something big smashed this spot.
An asteroid strike on land is devastating, but an asteroid strike in the deep ocean is even worse. On both land and ocean, you get the plume of water vapor, sulfur, and dust blasted into the high atmosphere, raining molten rock down across a wide area. But for asteroid strikes in the ocean, this is followed by a devastating tsunami that inundates coastlines around the world. There are waves hundreds of meters high at the crash site, and they travel deep inland on every coastline. A local event becomes a global event.
But with the Eltanin meteor, this was followed by a prolonged ice age.
Professor James Goff and his colleagues from the University of New South Wales in Australia have been researching the Eltanin meteor and its after-effects. The timing of the impact seems to line up with geologic deposits in Chile, Australia and Antarctica. Geologists traditionally connected these deposits with slower geological processes, like glaciation. But Goff and his team think these deposits might have been dropped all at once by the devastating tsunami from Eltanin.
Here’s a video that shows how the impact and subsequent tsunami might have played out.
Although the Earth was already thought to be cooling in the mid to late Pliocene, the material kicked into the high atmosphere by Eltanin could have pushed the planet’s climate past the tipping point:
“There’s no doubt the world was already cooling through the mid and late Pliocene,” says co-author Professor Mike Archer. “What we’re suggesting is that the Eltanin impact may have rammed this slow-moving change forward in an instant – hurtling the world into the cycle of glaciations that characterized the next 2.5 million years and triggered our own evolution as a species.”
It was this time of a global ice age that transitioned the planet from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene. It was a bad time to be a Chalicothere or Anthracotheriidae, but a good time to be a hominid. So… thanks Eltanin.
Nothing matches the destructive power of a black hole; a singularity of dense matter with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light can escape. What goes in, doesn’t come back out. And so you can imagine how difficult it would be to probe the region inside a black hole’s event horizon. And yet, there’s a catastrophic event that should give scientists a momentary glance into the maelstrom, to partly understand what’s going on “in there.” That event would be the collision between two black holes.
As you probably know, there’s a supermassive black hole lurking at the heart of every galaxy. As these galaxies merge, these black holes encounter one another too. Sometimes a black hole is violently kicked into deep space, and other times they merge together into an even more super-supermassive black hole. The collision happens out of sight, beneath the shared event horizon. So, there’s no way to see what’s going on … and live to tell about it.
By looking at the gravity, however, astronomers might be able to peer right into the collision zone. One of the predictions made by Albert Einstein, as part of his famous General Theory of Relativity, is that dramatic gravitational events in the Universe, like the formation or collision of black holes should be detectable by the gravitational waves they generate. As these waves wash over us, the ripples in spacetime should be detectable by extremely sensitive instruments or spacecraft flying in formation.
A team of researchers from Cardiff University, Ioannis Kamaretsos, Mark Hannam and B. Sathyaprakash, have used a powerful supercomputer to simulate what kinds of gravitational waves might be generated by merging black holes. Two black holes orbiting one another should be emitting gravitational waves and gradually losing energy. This causes them to spiral inward, collide, and create a black hole which is highly deformed.
According to their simulation, the gravitational waves from this deformed black hole will give off a distinctive “tone”, like a ringing bell. In fact, by measuring only this tone, astronomers will be able to deduce both the mass of the black hole and the speed of its spin. Furthermore, the distortion of the gravitational waves should allow researchers to “see” what’s going on within the black hole’s event horizon; to understand what happened to the merging monsters after they disappeared beneath the shared event horizon.
“By comparing the strengths of the different tones, it is possible not only to learn about the final black hole, but also the properties of the original two black holes that took part in the collision,” Ioannis Kamaretsos said in a news release.
Of course, it’s important to note that gravitational waves themselves are still purely theoretical. Even though there are multiple ground-based detectors already built, and even more sensitive space-based detectors on the way, there hasn’t been a direct detection of a gravitational wave yet, only indirect detections. However, I wouldn’t bet against Einstein. He’s had a pretty good track record.
