News Briefs: Astronomy, Astophysics & Space Exploration

A well known polymath whose published works range far and wide, including (but not limited to) Archaeology, Paleontology, Astronomy, Space Propulsion systems, and Science Fiction.

Official Website: http://www.charlespellegrino.com

Moderators: Mr. Titanic, Charlie P., ed_the_engineer

User avatar
mayavision2012
Apprentice Scribe
Posts: 52
Joined: Tue Mar 20, 2007 7:58 pm
Location: Albuquerque NM
Contact:

Scientists puzzled by metal...it does not "occur in nature."

Post by mayavision2012 »

This may be an old story by now, but I just learned about it.

Image


Scientists from Rutgers University and the American Museum of Natural History reported May 11, that the New Jersey metal object is not a meteorite. The strange metal substance has been identified as a "stainless steel alloy that does not occur in nature." The metal object fell straight down through the New Jersey house roof with some force, but what was its origin? To date, scientists still do not know.

From Earthfiles.com.

Added 05/15/07, the following:

Hubble Finds Dark Matter Ring

Image
Although the invisible matter has been found before in other galaxy clusters, it has never been detected to be so largely separated from the hot gas and the galaxies that make up galaxy clusters, Jee said. 'By seeing a dark-matter structure that is not traced by galaxies and hot gas, we can study how it behaves differently from normal matter.' M. James Jee of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md
From Earthfiles.com.
Learn from the turtle, it only makes progress when it sticks out its neck.
JW Nugent
Bookworm
Posts: 48
Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2007 7:06 pm

RE not occuring in nature

Post by JW Nugent »

Questions about the non-meteorite: Did they consider it to have fallen from space or as an object placed in orbit and returned to Earth? Will they be running tests to determine if it is of earth origin or from elsewhere? What does one call an object such as this?

Anecdote: Once had something fall from the sky not far from me. Had the impression of a very dark object (black?) shooting by at about a 15degree decent. At first the impression was of an incoming air launched missile some how strayed off course. It passed with a air ripping sound like a jet yet without engine whine. There was a ridge line about 20m away and several metres in elevation above blocking my view of the final decent so I could never determine the impact zone. This was in the area of Spanish Peaks in Southern Colorado near the Continental Divide. Wish I could have located the impact site.
Observation is an important part of science; all that is required are your eyes and mind - an occasional notation allows the sharing of information and a uniform improvement in knowledge.
Darb
Punoholic
Posts: 18466
Joined: Mon May 05, 2003 9:15 am
Contact:

Post by Darb »

You can listen to the NASA/Shuttle mission audio link live:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

There's a lot of dead time, but it's still very interesting.
JW Nugent
Bookworm
Posts: 48
Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2007 7:06 pm

NASA

Post by JW Nugent »

Thanks I
Observation is an important part of science; all that is required are your eyes and mind - an occasional notation allows the sharing of information and a uniform improvement in knowledge.
JW Nugent
Bookworm
Posts: 48
Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2007 7:06 pm

Thanks I

Post by JW Nugent »

and I have no idea of what that was to become?

Did have another question sneak into my mind. Will the date test this piece of debris to see how old it is and can there be enough info gleened to determine if it matches (Universal DNA of a sort) emmissions from elsewhere? It would be interesting to know if it was cast off from somewhere or follows an a very different idea that has been fermenting in my mind?
Observation is an important part of science; all that is required are your eyes and mind - an occasional notation allows the sharing of information and a uniform improvement in knowledge.
Charlie P.
Professional Wordsmith
Posts: 221
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:03 pm
Contact:

Post by Charlie P. »

Like Prof. Nugent, I have been close enough to see a couple of fireballs during the final stage of entry (including a day-time fireball snapped by my mother, in what was supposed to be a photo of a field of sheep posing before the mountains of New Zealand). After the last of the sparks fly off and they are down to dense air at a terminal velocity of several hundred miles per hour (for stony remnants of roughly football-size: by contrast, a Toyota-mass object of metallic content would presumably continue at several miles per second, favoring litho-braking to aero-braking) - after the bright flares, I've seen them fade almost instantly to a single, red glowing spark falling rapidly. The air then, just as quickly, fades them from red to black.

When the Murchison meteorite fell upon Australia in 1969, a 1/2 millimeter, glassy fusion crust had formed over the individual pieces. The shedding of material down to formation of the the fusion crust had actually shed most of the heat as well, keeping the stone beneath the cool. Cold, in fact. Fragments that broke upon impact in the town of Murchison were actually icy inside (the mass of this carbonaceous meteorite - which along with the Orgueil France impactor is one of the three most interesting rocks in recorded history [see Allende, also a meteorite] - was approximately 10% internal water; and this same meteorite preserved evidence of hydrothermal veins in the parent body, dating back to the first half billion years of the Solar System).

The Martian moon Phobos is also a carbonaceous chondrite - which like Murchison and Orgueil, is likely to preserve ancient hydrothermals and pre-living chemical evolution, including abiotic amino acids and porphyrins, and protocells in salt veins.

I, for one, long for the day when we will see Mars covering the horison of Phobos - or the Earth and moon in the sky of a co-orbital asteroid (there are two, only a couple of weeks away by the same chemical propulsion methods planned for a return to the moon).

- C.R.P.
User avatar
Zomboy
Apprentice Scribe
Posts: 70
Joined: Tue Mar 08, 2005 1:09 am
Location: Canada

Post by Zomboy »

I saw a BIG fireball over Winnipeg, Canada in 1995. It abruptly disappeared without sparks or colour changes and there were no reports of fragments. But the size of the fireball sent a shiver of fear through me - I realized at the gut level of how vulnerable we are to celestial bombardments and that we need detection and deterence technology in place yesterday!
"No matter where you go, there you are."
Buckaroo Bonsai
Charlie P.
Professional Wordsmith
Posts: 221
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:03 pm
Contact:

Post by Charlie P. »

Agreed. Were it up to me, I would certainly give priority to one of the small co-orbital asteroids over a mission to Mars. Nine months either way to Mars is to my mind an unwarranted risk, by way of slow chemical propellants. Forty years from now a Valkyrie Mark II could put Mars as few as two weeks away - and put Titan within reach of Oregon Trail time frames.

Even the return to the moon, even the current plans for an international, Antarctica-style Lunar base, happens to be technologically premature. The time for a return to the moon is when we are able to exploit it industrially. The lunar modules currently under design and testing are simply the older LMs bulked up on steroids. The plan lacks imagination. By analogy, just imagine that forty years after Kittyhawk, with B-29 bombers already flying into history, with civilization on the brink of the jet age and with nuclear rockets already on the drawing boards, we decided to build a slightly larger Wilbur and Orville flier - which could carry two or three people three times as far as the original plane. People would certainly be asking, "Why?"

The new lunar module has the same basic defect as the old one. It has to be chem-milled to SCRAPE and SWIP every possible ounce - and in places, the skin will be, once again, as thin as two sheets of newspaper. Without an entire payload devoted to landing a storm-shelter nearby, the crew is doomed to lethal radiation dosage if a solar flare is detected and they cannot lift off and link up in time with the thicker-skinned, Earth re-entry module.

The world will not quite marvel at pictures of Earth on the lunar horizon. They've seen this all before. We are visually oriented creatures, and the majority of us are easily bored and distracted. Even more so today, than in 1969.

Earth and moon posing together in the sky of a co-orbital asteroid will be the kind of "postcard" that proclaims we have finally gone somewhere new (as opposed to going nowhere fast in near-Earth orbit, or returning to the moon before we are really ready to industrialize it).

The co-orbital asteroid mission is also far, far lass expensive. No advance supply modules or storm shelters are necessary. And no separate landing module, either. Not even a rover module. These bodies average about twice the diameter of a football field's length - and they are only two to four weeks away (depending on launch phase) at trans lunar ingection velocities (three days from the Earth to the Moon). One need only bring along a redundant propulsion system and propellant. If a long term mission is desired, one of the already built and tested inflatable space station modules need only be duplicated. At microgravity, the craft does not so much land on the asteroid as find a pole of rotation and dock with it. (The inflatable module can also be left behind, as the core of a more or less permanent base.) If solar flares are sending a particle bath toward the crew, they need only undock and hide in the asteroid's shadow until the storm passes - hardly the time-critical hazad that would be faced on the moon.

Most importantly, the asteroid mission would yield important new information, probably with more near-term Earth applications than we are likely to derive from the Moon at this time.

As for impactors, I am not worried so much about the civilization-ender that would give us more than ten or twenty years of advance warning (comets aside). It's the office-block-sized impactors that are not even being watched, that worry me, and should worry us all (certainly more so than "global warming"). During the first Gulf War in 1991, satellites recorded an approximately 20 kiloton burster above the Pacific. By a margin of minutes, it missed detonating high above the Iraq-Kuwait border. Carbonaceous or loose stony composition: it would not have produced a damaging shockwave at ground level; but it would certainly have given observers something to think about. The 1908 Siberian impactor was not quite as large as a co-orbital; yet it detonated with deadly effect, being of Allende type composition (with similar microdiamond dispersal), at 15 megatons. If that happened in the same place today, and if it were not immediately identified as a natural impactor - - and if it likewise did not detonate over ocean, but followed the nearly one-in-three chance of detonating randomly over Europe, or China, India, Pakistan, North America... South Korea... it could still become a civilization killer.

During the next couple of decades, even the particle bed cluster could conceivably be adapted for rapid acceleration of roughly "ten Toyota masses," up to 750 km/second - a velocity that could dust a carbonaceous chondrite of Allende hardness 1/3 kilometer in diameter. In theory, a "slow relativistic bomb" could literally (and with fast arrival time from the moment of detection) blast a small impactor to a spreading dust shower before it could cause harm.

We need to learn what these objects are made of, and where all of them are (all of them). It's what we don't know that can bite us in the neck.

Of course, there is also the fringe benefit of studying pre-living chemical evolution (and possibly protocell evolution) inside the carbonaceous asteroids.

C.R.P.
Darb
Punoholic
Posts: 18466
Joined: Mon May 05, 2003 9:15 am
Contact:

Post by Darb »

Annual PERSEID Meteor Shower: Aug 12th, 2007

Coinciding with a moonless sky, this year's display should be a good one.
Charlie P.
Professional Wordsmith
Posts: 221
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:03 pm
Contact:

Post by Charlie P. »

I'm hoping to be way out on the island, and in the dark, for this one - with Mary and the kids. BTW: Nature has requested a follow-up Futures piece from Ashley, and this time she's written a really dark one that makes "On the Beach" seem almost optimistic by comparison. One little twin is still breaking codes. The other idolizes Wednesday Adams.

Children of the Corn. - CRP
Darb
Punoholic
Posts: 18466
Joined: Mon May 05, 2003 9:15 am
Contact:

Post by Darb »

Charlie: call me if you'd like my wife and I to join you. Weather permitting, we usually try catch the perseids or leonids every year ... been doing it since we first began dating.
Darb
Punoholic
Posts: 18466
Joined: Mon May 05, 2003 9:15 am
Contact:

Post by Darb »

The Phoenix Lander Mission to Mars lifted off earlier this morning.
User avatar
wolfspirit
MST3K
Posts: 3048
Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2003 12:39 pm

Post by wolfspirit »

Brad wrote:The Phoenix Lander Mission to Mars lifted off earlier this morning.
Early _saturday_ morning.

I was up and watching/taping it at 3am saturday morning.

Scott
Darb
Punoholic
Posts: 18466
Joined: Mon May 05, 2003 9:15 am
Contact:

Post by Darb »

My bad. It's been quite a weekend.
Brad wrote:The Phoenix Lander Mission to Mars lifted off earlier <strike>this morning</strike>.
Fixed. ;)
Darb
Punoholic
Posts: 18466
Joined: Mon May 05, 2003 9:15 am
Contact:

Post by Darb »

{snip}
Lowell Observatory has just announced the discovery of the largest extrasolar planet known.

To learn more about the planet and the discovery technique, see the article at space.com:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 ... lanet.html
or visit Lowell’s home page for the story: http://www.lowell.edu
User avatar
wolfspirit
MST3K
Posts: 3048
Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2003 12:39 pm

Post by wolfspirit »

Brad wrote:{snip}
Lowell Observatory has just announced the discovery of the largest extrasolar planet known.

To learn more about the planet and the discovery technique, see the article at space.com:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 ... lanet.html
or visit Lowell&#8217;s home page for the story: http://www.lowell.edu
I would much rather have the opposite discovered. I would love for them to discover earth sized or smaller exoplanets.

However, the largest planet is also interesting.

Scott
Mr. Titanic
Scholar Adept
Posts: 1368
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 1:52 pm
Location: Thera
Contact:

Post by Mr. Titanic »

Terrestrial planets are much harder to discover. Although one was discovered recently, it must be quite rare. Largest is interesting though.
Darb
Punoholic
Posts: 18466
Joined: Mon May 05, 2003 9:15 am
Contact:

Post by Darb »

I agree with Wolfspirit ... the only way we'll ever discover the types of planets that could possibly sustain life as we know it will be developing the ability to detect smaller planets within the range of a sun's ecosphere. Large heavy gas giants, detected purely by gravitational variances, while very interesting, are hardly the show-stopper we're looking for.
Last edited by Darb on Wed Aug 08, 2007 10:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mr. Titanic
Scholar Adept
Posts: 1368
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 1:52 pm
Location: Thera
Contact:

Post by Mr. Titanic »

The only current way to discover terrestrial planets is when they cross in front of a star and contrast as a dark object against it's light. So although I agree that we do need to develop a new, more sohpisticated method to discover them, I'm sure scientsists would as well. Currently I think that with the technology available gas giants remain quite interesting.
User avatar
wolfspirit
MST3K
Posts: 3048
Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2003 12:39 pm

Post by wolfspirit »

Mr. Titanic wrote:The only current way to discover terrestrial planets is when they cross in front of a star and contrast as a dark object against it's light.
Wrong.

Scientists can also measure the change in velocity of a star, to determine if there is a planet orbiting it or not (doppler effect works to our benefit here).

Most of the smaller planets that have been discovered, have used this method.

See: http://exoplanets.org/exoplanets_pub.html

Scott
Darb
Punoholic
Posts: 18466
Joined: Mon May 05, 2003 9:15 am
Contact:

Post by Darb »

Image from the site Wolfspirit linked:

Image

Like we were saying, most of the detections to date are near or above the 10^2 Earth Mass range ... typically, gas giants, on which life is almost certainly impossible.

We'll be able to sense progressively smaller ones as technologies improve over time.
Mr. Titanic
Scholar Adept
Posts: 1368
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 1:52 pm
Location: Thera
Contact:

Post by Mr. Titanic »

Wow. I didn't think an earth-sized terrestrial planet could have a significant effect on a star. Interesting. I've read about the Doppler effect used to detect galaxies (and form the theory that the universe is expanding based on the fact Doppler shows that they are moving further away.) But I didn't know it was applied here as well.
User avatar
tollbaby
anything but this ...
Posts: 6827
Joined: Sun Mar 09, 2003 11:03 am
Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Contact:

Post by tollbaby »

wolfspirit is an astronomy major (? or something related to astronomy)... he's pretty read up on these things :D
And what manner of jackassery must we put up with today? ~ Danae, Non Sequitur
Mr. Titanic
Scholar Adept
Posts: 1368
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 1:52 pm
Location: Thera
Contact:

Post by Mr. Titanic »

Ahh I see. I'm just interested in science. Astronomy isn't my preference, but I still find it fascinating as anyone else would.
Darb
Punoholic
Posts: 18466
Joined: Mon May 05, 2003 9:15 am
Contact:

Post by Darb »

Mr. Titanic wrote:Ahh I see. I'm just interested in science. Astronomy isn't my preference, but I still find it fascinating as anyone else would.
The last time I went star gazing with Charlie, the photo we took almost made Sir Arthur Clarke spray his tea.
Post Reply

Return to “Charles Pellegrino”