Space News

Big Rock Passing By July 2nd, Hubble Telescope Blind

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The silly, petty stuff we earthlings do look pathetic from the point of view of Mother Nature who is playing billiards with us again, using large rocks that hurtle past our own particular rock. Just in time for the Hubble Space Telescope going blind! Of course, we need to spend all our money trying to make people on the other side of the planet give up their land or resources to us or else. Fools, we be.

Looks like this cosmic billiard ball is going to miss us, whoopee.

Joe Rao
SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
SPACE.com Mon Jun 26, 1:00 PM ET
An asteroid possibly as large as a half-mile or more in diameter is rapidly approaching the Earth. There is no need for concern, for no collision is in the offing, but the space rock will make an exceptionally close approach to our planet early on Monday, July 3, passing just beyond the Moon's average distance from Earth.

Astronomers will attempt to get a more accurate assessment of the asteroid's size by “pinging” it with radar.

*snip*

The latest calculations show that 2004 XP14 will pass closest to Earth at 04:25 UT on July 3 (12:25 a.m. EDT or 9:25 p.m. PDT on July 2). The asteroid's distance from Earth at that moment will be 268,624-miles (432,308 km), or just 1.1 times the Moon's average distance from Earth.

*snip*

On April 13, 2029, observers in Asia and North Africa will have a chance to see another asteroid, but without needing a telescope. Asteroid 99942 Apophis, about 1,000 feet (300 meters) wide, is expected to be visible to the naked eye as it passes within 20,000 miles (32,000 km). Astronomers say an asteroid that large comes that close about once every 1,500 years.

We should be wondering why so many asteroids are poppiing up in this particular timeframe. It creeps me out, ahem. Well, we live near the bottom of the sun's gravitational pool and so it is no surprise to see various objects that are slowly being devoured by our sun or broken into tiny bits when they hit various objects in our solar system, well, look at our moon!

We don't look like that only because the earth is a living entity and the plants, animals and waters all cover up nearly all traces of celestial collisions. Alas, the process of fixing things again often involves evolving a host of new lifeforms from the few survivors.

I would imagine mere humans would put aside their petty, silly differences and focus on what really matters. And this matters....a lot.

A great time for us to lose our 'eye in the sky', the Hubble Space Telescope!

By Brian Witte
Associated Press
Sunday, June 25, 2006; Page A11

BALTIMORE, June 24 -- The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which has revolutionized astronomy with its stunning pictures of the universe, has stopped working, an instrument specialist who works with the camera said Saturday.

This annoys the heck out of me. What on earth is the space shuttle for if not for this? I see the Space News sites are boasting about how we will be using this latest, belated space shuttle flight---studying fruit flies. Oh, like, wow.

Argh. So much for sane uses of our precious, last few space shuttles! They go up, go down and do nearly nothing in between except be a garbage scow? Why bother? On to Mars, everyone!

And things aren't working out so hot at NASA, are they?

By Robert Z. Pearlman
posted: 26 June 2006
05:36 pm ET
Less than a year after his first spaceflight and just one week shy of his helping to lead another from the ground, Charles Camarda has been fired from his position as Director, Engineering at NASA Johnson Space Center.

In an e-mail written by Camarda and obtained by collectSPACE, the astronaut praised his colleagues' preparation for STS-121 and offered his regrets that he would "not be there with my team" when Discovery launches July 1.

Camarda did not fully explain what led to his request to be let go, but wrote that he "cannot accept the methods I believe are being used by this Center to select future leaders." In addition to personnel concerns, Camarda wrote that he refused to "abandon" his position on the STS-121 Mission Management Team and asked that if he was not allowed to work the mission, that "I would have to be fired from my position and I was."

Maybe we could hire some fruit flies. They know all about flying. They also have great eyesight, lots of lenses. Probably are smarter than the entire Bush administration. Heck, hand over Homeland Security and FEMA to them! Bzzzzz.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Huge Fire Ball Falling Into Abell 3266

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Every day, new data comes flowing in and astronomers do a double take and they try to keep their heads above water as the tide rises. Everywhere they look, nothing is exactly as expected, often totally different and utterly unexplainable. Time for invisible 'dark matter'---the new 'ether'!

Mysterious giant fireball is falling towards equally mysterious global cluster group, Abell 3266.

12 June 2006
Thanks to data from ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray satellite, a team of international scientists found a comet-like ball of gas over a thousand million times the mass of the sun hurling through a distant galaxy cluster over 750 kilometres per second.

This colossal 'ball of fire' is by far the largest object of this kind ever identified.
The gas ball is about three million light years across, or about five thousand million times the size of our solar system. It appears from our perspective as a circular X-ray glow with a comet-like tail nearly half the size of the moon.

"The size and velocity of this gas ball is truly fantastic," said Dr Alexis Finoguenov, adjunct assistant professor of physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and an associated scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Extra-Terrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. "This is likely a massive building block being delivered to one of the largest assembly of galaxies we know."

The gas ball is in a galaxy cluster called Abell 3266, millions of light years from Earth, thus posing absolutely no danger to our solar system. Abell 3266 contains hundreds of galaxies and great amounts of hot gas that is nearly a hundred million degrees. Both the cluster gas and the giant gas ball are held together by the gravitational attraction of unseen dark matter.

If the universe is moving away from each other odd amounts of gas wouldn't be rapidly moving towards other objects. There are a million questions surrounding this hot gas. How did it become hot in the first place? Why is it moving towards something else instead of rapidly flying off into the wild blue yonder? Where did it originate? If it was a huge star that blew up, why is it alone? So far, all the stars we see are parts of galaxies. We don't even know why mini galaxies form and why they float around for some time until they fall helplessly into the nearest galactic pool.

Just one day after posting my usual story based on immediate observational events, along comes yet another one putting yet another nail in the 'universe is flying apart' model. I now see increasingly, astronomers refering to 'dark matter' to explain away the increasingly obvious truth that the universe isn't flying apart but is doing something very different.

Like folding into itself.

Back to this amazing hot gas: in the last 15 years, astronomers using other wave lengths have noticed the universe is quite different when we can see many levels of energy. Namely, it is much more complex as well as extensive. Connections between galaxies that were totally hidden from view leap out and show increasingly that many galaxies aren't merely near each other, they share common energy envelopes. Some of these envelopes are extremely hot which means something very powerful is at work. As I keep pointing out, trying to explain away every observation that pours in is causing more and more distress to astronomers. This is also a very exciting time to be in that field. The coming battle to explain the manifold and multitudenous contridictions will be interesting, a budding Einstein somewhere will take all this mess and refit it into a new theory. One might dare call it the Unified Theory, heh (joking...maybe!)

Here is a recent paper about Abell 3266

We present results from a BeppoSAX observation of the rich cluster Abell 3266. The broadband spectrum (2-50 keV) of the cluster, when fitted with an optically thin thermal emission model, yields a temperature of 8.1+/-0.2 keV and a metal abundance of 0.17+/-0.02 in solar units, with no evidence of a hard X-ray excess in the Phoswich Detector System spectrum. By performing a spatially resolved spectral analysis, we find that the projected temperature drops with increasing radius, going from ~10 keV at the cluster core to ~5 keV at about 1.5 Mpc. Our BeppoSAX temperature profile is in good agreement with the ASCA temperature profile of Markevitch et al. From our two-dimensional temperature map, we find that the gradient is observed in all azimuthal directions. The temperature gradient may have been caused by a recent merger event that was also responsible for a velocity-dispersion gradient measured in the optical band. The projected metal abundance profile and the two-dimensional map are both consistent with being constant.

I like the 'temperature gradient (of the gas cloud) may have been caused by a recent merger event...! Isn't it funny how everywhere we train our observations, we see such things? If I were observing a highway and instead of seeing the cars drive off into the distance, instead, saw accidents in every direction including fireballs, I would think maybe the cars aren't driving off into the distance, right?

This is from last summer.

Waterloo ON (SPX) Aug 31, 2005
A comprehensive survey of more than 4,000 elliptical and lenticular galaxies in 93 nearby galaxy clusters has found a curious case of galactic "downsizing."

Contrary to expectations, the largest, brightest galaxies in the census consist almost exclusively of very old stars, with much of their stellar populations having formed as long ago as 13 billion years.

There appears to be very little recent star formation in these galaxies, nor is there strong evidence for recent ingestion of smaller, younger galaxies.

By contrast, the smaller, fainter galaxies studied by the NOAO Fundamental Plane Survey are significantly younger -- their stars were formed as little as four billion years ago, according to new results from the survey team to be published in the September 10, 2005, Astrophysical Journal.

The evolutionary history of elliptical galaxies and lenticular galaxies (which have a central bulge and a disk, but no evidence of spiral arms) is not well understood.

Not well understood? Understatement of the century. We really can't know anything unless we gather more data. We are in a very rich period in astronomy. Like the shattering effects of the invention of the telescope utterly transforming astronomy so it is today with the many multi-mirror arrays, radar, ultraviolet, infrared, space and terrestrial observatories, our eyes are literally being opened in a most forceful way.

My grandfather and his cohorts, when working with Lowell on Mars studies, tried to pin down those canals everyone assumed were there. There were none! Was this a waste?

Aside from inspiring a host of fun Martian sciensefiction stories and movies, that is.

If they ignored the heavens, there would have never been a push to learn more, to build better observatories, to launch orbital observatories. The race to explain all these mysteries is what pushes science forwards. But every once and a while, the flood of information begins to show many discordances, many paradoxes. Then there is a crisis as things look odder and odder and the puzzle pieces no longer fit. We are rapidly approaching exactly such a time.

I am really looking forwards to what happens next.

It is sad that Hawkings is no longer able to easily communicate or rummage through the incoming data.

BBC: Physicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter are to write a science book for children which will be "a bit like Harry Potter", but without the magic.

They aim to explain theoretical physics in an accessible way to youngsters.

Professor Hawking became famous for his bestseller A Brief History of Time, which attempted to simplify cosmology, the Big Bang and black holes.

He communicates through his family through blinking his eyes. And that is exhausting him. What I liked about him, years ago, was his willingness to think of all sorts of things outside of the box. He did this with the slenderest of information. It is only the last three years we have truly begun to see dimly, what is going on in the deep past or the other side of the cosmos. And every view we get astonishes us endlessly and fits no previous matrix created so craftily by previous studies.

But every generation has its geniuses and I believe there are plenty of candidates for this and someone will be the next great astronomical architect.

Culture of Life News Main Page

More Meteorites Burn Brightly--And Galaxies Puzzle Astronomers More And More

Elaine Meinel Supkis

It makes virtually no news these days but there was another large meteorite event this week right on the heels of the big event in Finland. Also, as more information comes in concerning galaxies, the more confused astronomers are. The information does not fit the 'rapidly expanding away from each other' picture painted by increasingly desperate astronomers based mostly on red shift data.

A big sonic boom and break up of meteorite startles people living around the Great Lakes.

BY STEVE KUCHERA
NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

The mysterious light seen over the Northland on Friday night was an especially bright meteor seen in at least two states and Canada.

"Anyone who saw it should count themselves as lucky -- they are probably not going to see another one like that in their lifetime," Scott Young said.

Young is an astronomer and manager of the planetarium and science gallery at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. The museum is collecting reports of sightings of Friday's fireball, which traveled from south to north over the Northland about 11:35 p.m. Friday.

If someone were lobbing bombs at us we would be on full alert. Since the entity doing this is celestial, we shrug our shoulders. Bush has had NASA cut many programs for watching the planet earth. One would imagine, watching out for our home planet would be the primary focus of NASA but nope. Even as millions of people believe in and watch for UFOs, there seems to be a certain lack of interest in the UFO community as well as our defense forces for looking at flying celestial objects called 'meteorites' or 'comets.' These objects can and will annihilate most life forms if a particularily large one hits. Even if we observe and track the ones in the nearer parts of the solar system we already know that even more dangerous ones lurk far away at the outer edges or beyond our solar system.

Staying alert for this is of highest importance. We still have no way of averting danger, this ought to be th primary focus of the space program, not going to Mars! Once we figure this out, we will have the luxury to explore other planets with escaping our solar system as a goal.

Here is an earlier story this spring about the near pass of a comet.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/24mar_73p.htm

In 1995, Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 did something unexpected: it fell apart. For no apparent reason, the comet's nucleus split into at least three "mini-comets" flying single file through space. Astronomers watched with interest, but the view was blurry even through large telescopes. "73P" was a hundred and fifty million miles away.

We're about to get a much closer look. In May 2006 the fragments are going to fly past Earth closer than any comet has come in more than twenty years.

Meanwhile, Astronomers discover new star cluster group that has been captured by our own Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers have discovered a long, slender stream of ancient stars racing across the northern sky. The stream is about 30,000 light-years from Earth and flowing high over the Milky Way at some 230 kilometers per second, or more than half a million miles per hour.

The discovery was made by Canadian astronomer Carl Grillmair and his colleague Odysseas Dionatos from the Astronomical Observatory of Rome. Grillmair presented the findings this week at the 208th American Astronomical Society meeting in his hometown of Calgary.

"What we can see of the stream is over 30,000 light years long," Grillmair said, "although it may actually be much longer than that since we are currently limited by the extent of the survey data. I would actually be somewhat surprised if the stream doesn't extend completely around the Galaxy."

The astronomers think the stars on this cosmic highway date back nearly to the beginning of the universe and are the fossil remains of a star cluster that, in its prime, contained between 10,000 and 100,000 stars.

Since this new data totally destroys much of what astronomers have to learn in order to get degrees in this field, there is tremendous resistence to the reality it screams at them: the universe has ceased 'flying apart' and far from flying apart faster and faster, star systems are falling INTO each other. According to the data, the stars in this cluster had been around billions of years, from the Big Bang. According to theology within astronomic temples, this cluster which was formed from the hot gases of the creation then set up at tremendous speed away from all other star systems. So, how did it end up circling our star system?

If it was moving away, how could it come here? Haha. Obviously, even after 12 billion or so years of frantically heading straight outwards, it was really sliding down our galaxy's gravitational pool. It isn't the only star cluster doing this! It seems our galaxy is made up of a lot of star clusters that kind of fell towards our central black hole. I would suggest even our dear sun is such a star. Far from being hatched here in the galactic nursery, perhaps our star which is pretty old, you know, was captured by the galaxy which is why we are still in one of the outer arms rather than sucked down the maw of the monster residing at the heart of this system.

And what astronomers see at the other end of the universe doesn't fit the present dogma, either!

Space.com: A ghostly blue blob amid a swarm of red dots in a new cosmic image is the superhot intergalactic gas permeating the space within the most distant cluster of galaxies found to date.

Located nearly 10 billion light-years away, Cluster XMMXCS 2215-1738 is being hailed by its discoverers as a tantalizing glimpse of what galaxy clusters were like at their earliest stages of formation.

Individual galaxies have been detected at greater distances. But the newly discovered cluster contains several hundred galaxies bound together by mutual gravitational attraction.

The finding was announced here this week at the 208th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

A light-year is the distance that light can travel in a year, so the light from this cluster took almost 10 billion years to reach us. Since the universe is thought to be 13.7 billion years old, the record-setting cluster must have formed when the universe was relatively young.

"Yet this distant cluster appears to be full of old galaxies," discovery team member Adam Stanford noted with amazement.

I am happy to see he is 'amazed.' Maybe, just maybe, astronomers will realize we are looking at the opposite side of time rather than 'back' in time? All galaxies near us are falling into other galaxies. As of today, we can now see all galaxies at the other extreme of the universe are also falling into each other! Huh? What gives?

This seems increasingly like a collapsing universe rather than one that is flying apart. I am not an astronomer. I can't come up with elegant formulas to explain things. I am an artist, if not a great artist, but I look at the universe with an artist's eyes. And the images don't fit the dogma as expressed by modern astronomy. Shoehorning all this into a matrix that leaves out the idea that maybe space and time are NOT as we assume but is radically different will mean all discoveries will be a mish-mashed mess. As measurment systems and the ability to 'see' improves, the worse it is for the present cosmic system.

Some brave astronomer will come along and rearticulate all this into something new. And I am betting the 'falling apart until it disappears into the far reaches of nothingness' dogma will die. And good riddance. I couldn't stand that nihilist world view! Making creation a one time event. Gah.

This still doesn't answer the riddle, how did any of this come into being in the first place. Next time I see Pegasus, I'll ask (sound of laughter).

Culture of Life News Main Page

Meteorite Hits Finland

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Wednsday a meteorite was captured by a camera as it flew over Finland. No one saw this coming. It wasn't a huge rock but it was still pretty big. If it hit a city, the devastation would have been pretty bad. Luckily for humans, most meteorites are small or miss us. But not always.

Meteorite landed in least populated part of Findland, near the North Pole.

At around 2:05 a.m. on Wednesday, residents of the northern part of Troms and the western areas of Finnmark could clearly see a ball of fire taking several seconds to travel across the sky.

A few minutes later an impact could be heard and geophysics and seismology research foundation NORSAR registered a powerful sound and seismic disturbances at 02:13.25 a.m. at their station in Karasjok.

Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.

"I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash.

"I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said.

One of the problems with tracking objects in space is many of them are pretty invisible until they enter our atmosphere. Recently, a comet whizzed by the earth and it is in the last stages of disintigration. There is a lot of this out there and we can't see it until it arrives. With several comets falling apart this last year, it is no surprise to see fragments of interstellar debris dropping on us so unexpectedly.

Here is an earlier story of a similar meteorite hitting northern Finland.

Meteorite suspected of hitting river in northern Finland
NewRoom Finland
December 30, 2005

A large explosion crater found in the Mantokoski river in Utsjoki, northern Finland, may be caused by a meteorite, said Juhani Harjunharja, chair of the Ursa astronomical association, in a statement Friday.

The crater has an estimated diameter of as much as 300 meters. Samples are being sent to the University of Oulu for examination. The possibility of the crater being caused by the remnant of a satellite has not been ruled out.

"For my part I am strongly leaning towards the opinion that it is a meteorite", Mr Harjunharja said.

Every year, pieces of the puzzle of our earth's past are found laying right under our feet and one of the more important pieces are the various impact craters. This is something we have to take seriously just like mega-volcano events or tsunami-earthquake disasters. Meteor Crater in Arizona is a stark reminder that even as humans walked this green earth, a very large meteor struck the USA. Such an event today would be most dire!

This is why the space program should get hopping on tracking all these celestial peas being shot at us!

This is the website that discusses the famous mysterious Russian explosion.

The rock that hit this week or last December weren't very big but this latest is the biggest to hit since the Siberian event. If that event was like buckshot, it was still pretty destructive. So far, I haven't seen news of anyone finding the meteorite yet.

J. Smith sent me this email about Itokawa which is a strange conglamoration of pretty much everything possible, it isn't very solid but is probably similar to what hit Siberia in 1904.

"Most asteroid scientists had not expected to find Itokawa to be a rubble pile; its gravity, smaller than that of Earth by five orders of magnitude, was thought too small to hold it together. It is not even clear why Itokawa is there at all, given that you just have to shake it gently at about 10 cm/s (escape velocity) for it to fly apart. But Itokawa hangs on to its pieces. It seems to be nothing but pieces: a sediment-world governed by ballistic mobilization and pulverization, seismic shaking by impact, vibrational size sorting, low strain rate flow of charged granules, complex gravitational dynamics, dust levitation by photoionization, and solar wind winnowing of lofted dust. Weird stuff. Impact craters are resurfaced as quickly as they form, and smooth deep gravel beds ("seas") are found.

The infrared (6) and x-ray fluorescence (7) spectroscopy experiments onboard the orbiting spacecraft have determined that Itokawa is probably chondritic in composition. This is in concordance with the NEAR spectroscopic investigation of Eros (8), another S-type asteroid. The density of an ordinary chondrite meteorite is around 3 to 3.5g/cm3. Abe et al. (9) use laser altimetry and spacecraft telemetry to derive the mass of Itokawa (3.5 x 1010 kg), giving a density value (1.9 g/cm3). If chondritic, it must have a porosity around 40%, which is greater than the porosity of sand and about as loose as you can possibly pack a rock pile. Itokawa would have to be extremely loose rubble all the way down (10)."

Cool, huh?

- J.

In Kerala, India, there was a mysterious 'red rain' event which some scientists think was caused by a disintigrating comet.

Kottayam, May 31: The "red rains" in Kerala five years ago was the result of the atmospheric disintegration of a comet, according to a study.

The study conducted at the School of Pure and Applied Physics of the MG University here by Dr Godfrey Louis and his student a Santosh Kumar shows that red rain cells were devoid of DNA which suggests their extra-terrestrial origin.

The findings published in the international journal 'Astrophysics and Space Science' state that the fragment contained dense collection of red cells.

This was in the BBC, too. I looked at the pictures of what 'fell' and it looked like red blood cells only these didn't have DNA so I have no idea what is going on. Just another mystery and there are so many mysteries to solve. Whenever anyone says there isn't anything left to figure out, well, I doubt that will ever happen. Life forms are of infinite variety and expression.

And no two snowflakes are exactly the same. And the more we look around, the less we know, just the sheer variety of the galaxies that surround us is staggering. And each one is different. Let's hope we are around a long time so we can figure this all out.

Culture of Life News Main Page

TO READ MORE CLICK HERE