Travelers In The Night24 Maalis 2023

737-Collision(525)

I was asteroid hunting with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Steve Larson sent me an email requesting that I obtain some images of the asteroid 6478 Gault. Several days earlier, using mountain top telescopes in the Hawaiian islands , astronomers working with the ATLAS project reported that the perviously normally appearing asteroid 6478 Gault now has a 250,000 mile long straight tail. I added together four 60 second images which revealed a point of light with a tail which appeared to be similar to a long straight contrail left by a jet airplane high above the Earth. Images taken of 6478 Gault over the past several months suggest that it hit another object in the asteroid belt. If this idea is correct the collision fragments are what are giving this asteroid its long thin tail. Asteroid Gault is approximately 2.3 miles in diameter and thought to be a member of the Phocaea [Pho e ah] Family of main belt asteroids which themselves were formed by a violent collision about 2.2 billion years ago. This swarm of 2,000 space rocks , orbit the Sun once about every 3.5 years, between Mars and Jupiter.The object which the 2.3 mile diameter Gault hit is likely to have been a third of a mile diameter space rock. This celestial crash left Gault with a 250,000 long straight tail.

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Jaksot(1000)

406E-447-Nuking An Asteroid

Tonight, even though the chances are extremely slim, an asteroid hunter could find a sizable asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth. If we have decades warning, the potential impactor's arri...

15 Syys 2min

916-Past Glory

When accurately recorded historical observations do not agree with what we what we see today it is often very rewarding to find out why. In modern telescopes we see Theta Eridani to a be pair separate...

11 Syys 2min

405E-446-Asteroid Homestead

In the future one can envision a space mining family boarding a descendent of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Vehicle for a trip into low Earth orbit. A few hundred miles above the Earth's surface they...

8 Syys 2min

915-Raining Comets

The comets we observe generally start out as icy dirty snowballs of frozen gases like water and frozen carbon dioxide in the Oort cloud. If recent scientific analysis is correct, we are now witnessing...

4 Syys 2min

404E-445-Not So Secret

A partnership of humans and computers will help to minimize the damage when asteroid hunters find a space rock with our number on it.

1 Syys 2min

914-Deep Synoptic Array

Looking into the sky at night with radio eyes you would not see the points of starlight forming the constellations instead you would see a very bright, colorful and wildly changing scene. In a desert ...

28 Elo 2min

403E-444-Near Comets

Although no comet nucleus impact on the Earth has been conclusively identified, there is some evidence that suggests the 1908 Tunguska event in Russia, which knocked down trees over a 770 square mile ...

25 Elo 2min

913-Moon Impact

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21 Elo 2min