AstroNews Aug 2002

SHOOTING STAR SPECIAL

• PERSEID METEOR SHOWER

• SHOOTING STAR SPOTTING SUGGESTIONS

• ALL ABOUT PERSEID METEORS

• ASTEROID CLOSE ENCOUNTER

• OUR PLANET WAS BEATEN UP

• THE TORINO SCALE

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Up This Month
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LOOK UP!

PERSEID METEOR SHOWER

The sky is on fire!

That's right, the annual PERSEID meteor shower, peaks on August 12th and 13th, 2002.

Glance up for a few minutes after sunset and you'll probably spot a dazzling Perseid shooting star.

The light show really begins after 1 AM and lasts until sunrise. Late night sky gazers can spot hundreds of shooting stars before dawn.

Perseid meteors are fast, bright and colorful. The annual Perseid shower is one of the year's best. And if you're in the northern hemisphere it's a great way to enjoy a nice summer evening.

Our advice: set your alarm for 3 AM, crawl out of bed in your pajamas, put on a warm jacket enjoy the show for an hour or so.

Patient sky watchers can expect to see dozens to hundreds of meteors per hour. It doesn't get much better!

Oh, and if you're not much of a late night person, be sure to catch the Moon next to Venus shortly after sunset.

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SHOOTING STAR SPOTTING SUGGESTIONS

The Perseid meteors will appear over Earth's northern hemisphere when our planet plows through a dense swarm of comet dust.

Perseids tend to hug the horizon rather than shooting overhead.

Viewed from Earth's surface, the meteors appear to flow from the constellation Perseus (hence the name Perseids). Perseus is easy to spot from Europe and North America.

The best time to look for meteors is when Perseus is highest in the sky--between 2 a.m. and dawn. Lie down on a sleeping bag or a reclining lawn chair with your toes pointed northeast; and gaze upward. Soon you'll see shooting stars racing along the Milky Way.

SETI@home: A BIG HIT

SETI@home has nearly 4 million users. They use this software to search for ET. You can too! Use your home computer to help search for extraterrestrials!

How? The SETI@home screen saver is a scientific analytical software. It performs a mathematical operations on data you download from the SETI program.

SETI@home uses the largest telescope in the world, the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, to continuously scan the sky for radio signals.

So far no signs of life.

So if you want to help, maybe you can be the lucky one who finds ET!

Get SETI@home version 3.03:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

ASTROTIP

ALL ABOUT PERSEID METEORS

Those brilliant flashes of light are call meteoroids. They are about the size of tiny insects--perhaps as small as a flea or a mite.

Perseid meteors come from comet Swift-Tuttle. Every 130 years, the comet swoops in from deep space (beyond Pluto) and plunges through the plane of the solar system not far from Earth's orbit.

Astronomers once worried that Swift-Tuttle might hit our planet, but recent data and calculations show otherwise. There's no danger of a collision for at least a millennium and probably much longer.

Even so, little pieces of Swift-Tuttle do hit Earth. The comet's orbit is littered with bits of dusty debris. They bubble away from the comet's icy nucleus (propelled by evaporating ice) when Swift-Tuttle nears the Sun. These grains form a cloud that we plow through once a year.

They make vivid streaks across the sky not because they're big, but because they are fast-moving. Perseid meteoroids hit our atmosphere traveling 59 km/s (132,000 mph).

ASTEROID CLOSE ENCOUNTER

A rare opportunity awaits skywatchers in the Northern Hemisphere this month. Anyone with a small telescope or binoculars can see this special celestial event.

On the night of August 17-18 an asteroid about 800 meters (half a mile) across will cruise within 530,000 kilometers (330,000 miles) of Earth. That's only 1.3 times farther away than the moon.

On the night of closest approach, asteroid 2002 NY40 will cruise past Vega, the brightest star in summer evening skies. Many of you will recall that Vega is in the constellation Lyra.

Asteroids are usually hard to see because they're mostly black like charcoal. This asteroid will be seen as a dot of light moving 8 degrees per hour. So every four minutes it will cover a distance in the sky equal to the diameter of the moon.

North Americans have the best view after sunset on August 17th, and Europeans should catch it in the predawn hours of August 18th.

On August 16 big boulder will begin to pick up its pace. Two days later it will make its closest swing by Earth and be at its brightest.

Astronomers first spotted the space rock on July 14, using the one-meter LINEAR (Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research) telescope in New Mexico.

So pull out your binoculars because this may be the chance of a lifetime to actually see an asteriod!

http://www.astronomy.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/000/974xdpoz.asp

DISTANT DISCOVERIES

OUR PLANET WAS BEATEN UP

Our moon's cratered face tells a story of a violent past riddled with impacts. Lunar meteorites and samples brought to Earth describe an especially barbaric assault known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment" about 3.9 billion years ago.

Scientists think Earth was also a victim of this unexplained attack from space, but the planet has covered up any scars suffered from it through erosion and continental plate movements.

The first terrestrial evidence that Earth was indeed beaten up by this ancient onslaught was published in the July 25 issue of Nature,

What researchers found is a chemical fingerprint in Earth's oldest terrestrial rocks of a heavy meteorite bombardment 3.8 to 4 billion years ago. This could be evidence of the oldest-known impact event on Earth.

The evidence comes from 3.8-billion-year-old rocks collected in West Greenland and Canada. These metamorphosed sedimentary rocks from Earth's early crust contain unusual isotope compositions of the element tungsten.

The discovery might not only tell us more about the history of our planet but also about the evolution of life on it.

These giant impacts would have annihilated any possible existing life forms but also delivered complex molecules from carbonaceous chondrites to Earth’s surface.

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FAR OUT FACTS

THE TORINO SCALE

The Torino Scale is like a "Richter Scale" for categorizing the Earth impact hazard associated with newly discovered asteroids and comets.

It is intended to serve as a communication tool for astronomers and the public to assess the seriousness of predictions of close encounters by asteroids and comets.

When a new asteroid or comet is discovered, predictions for where the object will be months or decades in the future are naturally uncertain. These uncertainties arise because the discovery observations typically involve measurements over only a short orbital track and because all measurements have some limit in their precision.

Fortunately, for the majority of objects, even the initial calculations are sufficient to show that they will not make any close passes by the Earth within the next century. However, for some objects, 21st century close approaches and possible collisions with the Earth cannot be completely ruled out.

The Torino Scale goes from 0 to 10. 0 indicates zero or negligibly small chance of collision with the Earth. 10 indicates a collision is certain, and the impacting object is so large that it is capable of precipitating a global climatic disaster.

Remember the movies DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON. Those movies both showed collisions that rank a 10 on the Torino scale.

Check out the Torino Scale here:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/torino_scale.html

AstroNews is an electronic newsletter by Kahl Consultants. Stay abreast of astronomy and extraterrestrial news. 

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My god! It's full of stars!