Russian scientists have identified the first fragments from Friday’s meteorite in Chelyabinsk.
The pieces, found on the ice of a lake, were stony chondrites.
More on today’s Russian meteorite: Largest in a century.
My earlier skepticism appears incorrect. This impact actually happened.
Note the article’s sense of outrage and panic that we aren’t looking for these types of rocks:
Although a network of telescopes watches for asteroids that might strike Earth, it is geared towards spotting larger objects — between 100 metres and a kilometre in size. “Objects like that are nearly impossible to see until a day or two before impact,” says Timothy Spahr, Director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which tracks asteroids and small bodies. So far as he knows, he says, his centre also failed to spot the approaching rock.
Yet, today’s impact actually illustrates the wisdom of excluding this kind of small asteroid from searches. They aren’t big enough to do serious harm, and trying to find them would hamper searches for larger asteroids that do pose a serious risk.
Scientists now believe they have found evidence proving that the unknown origin of cosmic rays are supernova explosions.
This has been one of astronomy’s longest outstanding mysteries: What produces the interstellar cosmic rays that come from outside our solar system?
Asteroid 2012 DA14 might experience seismic activity, an asteroid quake, when it zips pass the Earth tomorrow.
[MIT scientist Richard] Binzel imagines what an astronaut floating alongside such an asteroid might see: “The surface could slowly sway or rock by a few centimeters. Other things to look for would be puffs of asteroid-dust rising from the surface and gentle avalanches on the steepest slopes of craters.” In rare cases, “rubble pile” asteroids might break apart during the encounter and then re-form as Earth recedes into the distance.
William Shatner proposes naming Pluto’s two unnamed moons Romulus and Vulcan.
Astronomers running the Pluto moon naming campaign accepted Vulcan, adding it to the list a day after Shatner suggested it, but Romulus didn’t make the cut. “Mr. Shatner’s second suggestion, Romulus, has a bit of a problem because it is already the name of a moon,” Mark Showalter, an astronomer involved with the competition, wrote in a blog on the Pluto Rocks website on Tuesday. “Romulus, along with his brother Remus, are the names of the moons of the asteroid 87 Silvia. They were discovered by a team led by my good colleague Franck Marchis, now a senior scientist at the SETI Institute.”
Chicken Little report: A 150 foot wide asteroid will buzz the Earth tomorrow at a distance of only 17,000 miles.
There have been numerous news articles about this fly-by for the last two weeks, all hyping the dangers of an impact that in this case simply won’t happen. A threat of an impact from an asteroid is real and should be dealt with, but the reporting here has at times been somewhat silly. Asteroid 2012 DA14 is not going to hit us as it goes by. All that will happen is that scientists will have take advantage of this opportunity to look at it.
Help name two of Pluto’s five moons!
Chicken Little report: An asteroid will miss the Earth by only 15,000 miles on Friday.
Kepler is back in operation after a ten day rest to save the mission.
When Kepler launched in March 2009, it had four reaction wheels — three for immediate use, and one spare. But one wheel (known as number two) failed in July 2012, so a major problem with the currently glitchy wheel (called number four) could spell the end of the $600 million Kepler mission. It’s unknown at the moment if the 10-day rest period will bring wheel number four back into line. “Over the next month, the engineering team will review the performance of reaction wheel #4 before, during and after the safe mode to determine the efficacy of the rest operation,” Hunter wrote.
Crash! Boom! A new infrared image of Betelgeuse suggests the star and its winds will smash into the interstellar medium in only a few thousand years.
If the bar [of gas] is a completely separate object, then taking into account the motion of Betelgeuse and its arcs and the separation between them and the bar, the [star’s] outermost arc will collide with the bar in just 5000 years, with the red supergiant star itself hitting the bar roughly 12 500 years later.
Even as the Kepler mission struggles to survive, the science team has released its entire database of exoplanet candidates to the public.
New and better quality images of the asteroid Toutatis from the Chang’e 2 fly-by have been released.
Uh-oh: Kepler has been shut down for ten days to save the mission.
The spacecraft was launched with four so-called reaction wheels that spin to help keep the telescope pointing at its target fields of stars. One of these, reaction wheel No 2, failed in July 2012, leaving three to do the maneuvers, including a quarterly roll to a new orientation. Now reaction wheel No 4 has shown early indications that it might fail, prompting its NASA controllers to attempt some long-distance maintenance. They hope that by resting the wheels, their lubricant will spread to ease increased friction.
If this wheel fails permanently, the Kepler mission would be over, as it would be impossible to orient the spacecraft with enough precision with only two wheels.
I reported on the discovery of Comet ISON back in September, noting then the possibilities that this could become one of the brightest comets in years, while giving its show in primetime for the northern hemisphere. As this article also notes, this show could also be a dud, as has happened before. Stay tuned.
This will be cool: Scientists are going to use Hubble to take six more deep field images.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s iconic “Deep Field” photo wowed the world in 1996 by revealing a huge collection of galaxies hiding inside a patch of the sky that looked like nothing more than blank space. Now NASA plans to image six more “empty” bits of sky for a whole new set of deep fields that could revolutionize astronomy once again. …
Since the original photo’s release, Hubble looked even longer at the same spot to create the “Ultra Deep Field” in 2004 and then the “eXtreme Deep Field” in 2012. But the new effort, called Hubble Frontier Fields, will be the first to try a similar technique on some new areas of the heavens. These photos won’t go quite as deep as the Ultra Deep Field, but will represent some of the deepest images of the universe ever taken.
Though I repeatedly challenged them at press conferences, too many astronomers claimed in 1996 that the first Hubble Deep Field was representative of the heavens, something that seemed unlikely considering how little of the heavens this one image saw. These new deep fields will help confirm — or disprove — that claim.
Volunteers are needed to analyze images from Mars. From the website:
We need your help to find and mark ‘fans’ and ‘blotches’ on the Martian surface. Scientists believe that these features indicate wind direction and speed. By tracking ‘fans’ and ‘blotches’ over the course of several Martian years to see how they form, evolve, disappear and reform, we can help planetary scientists better understand Mars’ climate. We also hope to find out if these features form in the same spot each year and also learn how they change.
A wildfire has damaged an astronomical observatory in Australia.
The telescopes mostly appear unharmed, though some support facilities and a lot of nearby homes have been destoryed.
The largest known spiral galaxy. With images.
Measuring tip-to-tip across its two outsized spiral arms, NGC 6872 spans more than 522,000 light-years, making it more than five times the size of our Milky Way galaxy.
For context, the Milky Way and its two Magellanic Clouds could easily fit inside this galaxy, with lots of room to spare.
The sky is not failing: New radar data of Apophis now indicates that its chances of the asteroid hitting the Earth in 2036 is zero.
This data doesn’t eliminate the chance of a collision, only postpones it much farther into the future.
How to watch the asteroid Apophis as it makes its not-so-close approach to Earth today. More here.
Closest approach, about 9 million miles, will take place around 5 pm (Eastern).
Tracking the orbit of the exoplanet in Fomalhaut’s debris disk.
Worlds without end: The Kepler science team today revealed an additional 461 candidate exoplanets, with four being less than twice Earth’s size and in the habitable zone.
Since the last Kepler catalog was released in February 2012, the number of candidates discovered in the Kepler data has increased by 20 percent and now totals 2,740 potential planets orbiting 2,036 stars. The most dramatic increases are seen in the number of Earth-size and super Earth-size candidates discovered, which grew by 43 and 21 percent respectively. The new data increases the number of stars discovered to have more than one planet candidate from 365 to 467. Today, 43 percent of Kepler’s planet candidates are observed to have neighbor planets.
Of these candidates, 105 have so far been confirmed to be exoplanets by other methods.
Note that these Kepler planets are in addition to the fifteen new exoplanets noted in my previous post.
Fifteen more exoplanets have been found, orbiting their stars in the habitable zone.
On Wednesday Apophis will pass the Earth at a distance of 9 million miles, allowing astronomers to gather more data about this asteroid’s orbit and composition.
Having crossed outside Earth’s orbit, Apophis will appear briefly in the night-time sky. Wednesday 9 January will afford astronomers the rare opportunity to bring a battery of telescopes to bear: from optical telescopes to radio telescopes to the European Space Agency’s Infrared Space Observatory Herschel. Two of the biggest unknowns that remain to be established are the asteroid’s mass and the way it is spinning. Both of these affect the asteroid’s orbit and without them, precise calculations cannot be made.
Swift demonstrates what a small 11-inch telescope can do in space with an spectacular gallery of images. The complete gallery can be seen here.
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered that a large number of dwarf galaxies are orbiting Andromedea in a flat plane, like our solar system, contrary to all predictions.
The study reveals almost 30 dwarf galaxies orbiting the larger Andromeda galaxy in this regular, solar system-like plane. The astronomers’ expectations were that these smaller galaxies should be buzzing around randomly, like bees around a hive. “This was completely unexpected,” said Geraint Lewis, one of the lead authors on the Nature publication. “The chance of this happening randomly is next to nothing.” The fact that astronomers now see that a majority of these little systems in fact contrive to map out an immensely large – approximately one million light years across – but extremely flattened structure, implies that this understanding is grossly incorrect. Either something about how these galaxies formed, or subsequently evolved, must have led them to trace out this peculiar, coherent, structure.
Billions and billions! Using data from a solar system detected by the Kepler space telescope, astronomers now extrapolate that there are at least as many planets as stars in our galaxy.
You can relax: New data has confirmed that asteroid 2011 AG5 will not hit the Earth in 2040.
An meteorite that crashed in the Sierra Nevada mountains in April was traveling at the fastest speed on record for an meteorite, almost 18 miles per second.
