Travelers In The Night

The Sun is our very own well behaved star. It rises and sets in our sky every day and powers and makes possible all life forms on planet Earth. A new appreciation for our Sun is growing as we learn more about other suns and their families of planets. The Trappist-1 system of 7 planets orbits a dim M type red dwarf star about 40 light years away in the constellation of Aquarius.Recently, Dr. Manasvi Lingam and Dr. Abraham Loeb of Harvard University have calculated the likelihood that planets orbiting red dwarf stars are able to possess an atmosphere conducive to life. They report, in a recently published a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology that the planet Trappist 1-e is more than 100 times less likely to be habitable than is the Earth. Another group from Harvard and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, headed up by Dr. Cecilia Garraffo also find the Trappist-1 planets to be a tough place to live. These researchers add that the close proximity of these planets to their host star put them at risk of having their atmospheres stripped off by high stellar winds and their surfaces bombarded with high energy particles and electromagnetic radiation. Go outside today and enjoy some gentle sunshine from our well behaved star.

On a a short June night my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was observing with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona in the constellation of Ursa Major when a relatively bright fast moving point of light appeared in a set of his images. Even though on its current path Greg's discovery, 2025 MM89, has virtually no chance of impacting our home planet asteroid hunters will continue to track it to make sure it doesn’t become a threat as it passes other objects in space.

75% of asteroid hunter's discoveries are called C type asteroids. They are dark, have a high abundance of carbon, consist of clay and silicate rocks, and may have a composition which is up to 22% water. Recently Dr. Phillip A. Bland of Curtin University in Australia and Dr. Bryan Travis of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona published an article in the on line journal Science Advances describing their numerical simulations of the evolution of the progenitors of the C type asteroids. These researchers find that these common asteroids are likely to have started out as giant convecting mud balls which could still exist at the center of large asteroids like Ceres. The C type asteroids are particularly significant in that they are likely to have been one of the ingredients which came together under gravity to form Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Their impacts upon a young Earth are likely to be the source of the water in our oceans. Of more immediate interest is that the type C asteroids could be a handy source of water and raw materials for space colonists either as they are currently flying through space or found buried in impact craters on the Moon.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 will not hit the Earth in 2032, has a 4% chance of hitting the moon, and most likely will pass within 900 miles of the lunar surface. If 2024 YR4 were to impact the Moon it could send about the mass of several small cargo ships into space with lunar escape velocity and could pose a threat to our satellites.

When it was first spotted by astronomers at Space Watch on Kitt Peak, 2008 GO98 appeared to be one of many outer main belt asteroids moving through the night sky. 9 years later when my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard observed it with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon it had a coma and a tail like a comet. Active asteroids like 2008 GO98 have asteroid orbits but sometimes show cometary activity which could be caused by a collision with another object and/or by thermal fracturing and ice sublimation caused by the slight warming they obtain from sunlight.

In a recent study Dr. Lynnane George and her co-authors investigate Space Elevator technology to remove materials from Ceres and deliver them to orbital depots around the solar system.  The tiny gravity of Ceres, nano-fiber technology, and different water propulsion systems are utilized by Dr. George and her team to construct theoretically possible systems which would extract raw materials from Ceres and deliver them to low Earth orbit and other locations within the solar system.  These researchers estimate such a transport system could reduce fuel costs by up to 60% compared to transport from the Earth’s surface.

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski discovered a 0.4 mile diameter asteroid with the Catalina Sky Survey Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, AZ. Two hours and 11 minutes later it came into a set images I obtained with the 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, AZ. After I reported it, the new object was tracked by telescopes in Arizona, New Zealand, Slovenia, Kansas, Australia, Hungary, France, and Brazil. The Minor Planet Center used these data to calculate it's 1,353 day long orbit around the Sun, estimate it's size, and give it the name 2017 MB1. Fortunately it will not impact the Earth in the foreseeable future. An object the size of 2017 MB1 strikes the Earth every 200,000 years or so releasing the energy of about 300 large hydrogen bombs. It's impact onto a land area could produce a crater 6 miles in diameter, a fire storm that would ignite vegetation, clouds of toxic dust, acid rain, and produce other ill effects. If 2017 MB1 landed in the middle of the ocean it would make a splash that would send up billions of tons of water into the atmosphere and create waves 1,200 feet high which would quickly dissipate and would be no threat to land many miles away.

Recently, using data from the Japanese infrared telescope AKARI,  Dr. Amos Y.A. Chen and his collaborators published a paper in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia which predicts the approximate positions of two massive Planet 9 candidates. To arrive at their conclusions this team carefully searched the AKARI observations for objects which over the course of months change their positions relative to distant stars and galaxies.   Further  observations are required to determine if either of these move like a Planet 9 or if instead they are some other type of distant astronomical object.

The Trappist-1 planetary system located about 40 light years away in the constellation of Aquarius consists of a small red dwarf star and 7 Earth sized planets. By carefully studying changes in the planet's transit timings and the shape of the dip in the host star's brightness as each planet transits across it, astronomers have been able to measure the orbital period, radius, and approximate mass for each of the 7 planets. Dr Billy Quarles of the University Oklahoma and his team used thousands of numerical simulations on super computers to investigate the range in each planet's parameters which would cause it to have a stable orbit and would thus produce the Trappist-1 solar system which we see today. Their results, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that 6 of Trappist-1's planets have rocky composition like the Earth the remaining one may be composed of 25 % water by mass compared to 0.02% water by mass for Earth. The next step will be to use the James Web Space Telescope equipped with the latest scientific instruments to study the atmospheres of these distant worlds.

Big Bear Solar Observatory is a unique facility operated by the New Jersey Institute of Technology.  Its 1.6 meter Goode Solar Telescope is located on the north side of Big Bear Lake at an elevation of 6,760 feet above sea level in the  San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California.  Being surrounded by cold water at high altitude provides the site with exceptional atmospheric stability and thus the possibility of extremely high quality solar images.  It is hard to predict the value of basic research, however, work like this will eventually enable scientists to better understand how solar flares and other activity in the Sun’s atmosphere effect  astronauts, communications systems, auroras, radio blackouts, geomagnetic storms, satellites, power grids, and more on our home planet

Humans are moving towards a day when there are space colonies in orbit, on the Moon, and the planet Mars, places where the force of gravity ranges between zero and 38% of what we experience every day. What effect will such different environments have on the regeneration of liver, skin, and other human body organs? To discover how the remarkable ability of Planaria flat worms to regenerate amputated body parts functions in a weightless environment researchers at Tufts University compared a group of whole and amputated flat worms which had lived for 5 weeks on the International Space Station with control groups which remained behind on planet Earth. The space faring flatworms were found to have undergone metabolic and other body function changes which persisted after they returned to Earth. Strangely one of the amputated worm fragments sent into space developed into an extremely rare double headed worm. Researchers were astonished since they had not seen this happen once during 5 years of observations of 15,000 worms. Further when both heads were removed from the space traveling double headed worm's middle section it grew 2 heads indicating that its body modification plan was permanent. The implications of these experiments for humans in space, if any, remain to be determined. Bottom line is we just don't know enough about how human reproduction and development will work off the Earth to plan on having permanent sustainable colonies elsewhere.

The US National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope is the worlds largest solar telescope. It is perched 10,000 feet  above sea level on the top of Haleakalā on the Hawaiian island Maui.   Its location and 4 meter mirror enables the Inouye to see details in the solar atmosphere as small in diameter as the island of Manhattan. 3D maps of the solar atmosphere produced by the Inouye’s new Visible Tunable Filter will enable humans to put their equipment into a safe mode when necessary

24 hours a day, 16,600 feet above sea level in the high dry desert of northern Chile, the 66 antennas of 1.4 billion dollar Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array or ALMA receives signals located between the infrared and radio portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The waves that ALMA receives have a length which is about the same as the thickness of a dime. The pattern of present and missing wavelengths in these signals contains the characteristic spectral signatures of the complex molecules that form the basis of living organisms.

After the Earth the Sun is the most important object for human beings in the Universe.  It is the energy source which produces our food and is the source for all of the energy and motion around us except for geothermal and nuclear energy sources. The Sun is normally well behaved the exception being solar storms which can dump incredible amounts of energy onto the Earth. Scientists are working hard to understand solar super storms to enable humans to mitigate the trillions of dollars damage one could cause to our modern electronic technology

The energy required to lift water, food, and construction materials from the Earth's surface is very expensive. Asteroids come relatively close to Earth and could provide space colonists with metals, carbon, water, and the other important ingredients of modern life. Most space rocks like most terrestrial rocks may be pretty and interesting but they are not a practical source of the materials humans use and need.

Sadly humans seem to be in the process of creating a cosmic land fill which will blot out much of the cosmos.

When Asteroid hunters discover a new object it is given a score ranging from 0 which means it is likely to be a distant main belt asteroid up to 100 which means that it is likely to come near to us. Each newly discovered asteroid which receives a score of 65 or greater is posted on the Minor Planet Center's Near Earth Object Confirmation Page so that telescopes around the world can track it to estimate it's size as well as to refine our knowledge of it's orbit around the Sun. NASA feeds data on each new discovery into its Scout software system. Scout is designed to identify those objects which are most likely to make a close approach to Earth in the very near future. It's alert allows astronomers to access the new object's risk of impact as well as to study it before it fades into the distance. Fortunately, asteroid hunters have not found any dangerous impacting asteroids, however, Scout's rapid alert has enabled astronomers to measure the size, chemical composition, and rate of rotation for a number of close approaching asteroids. These data are extremely important to plan an effective response should an object be found to be on a collision course with planet Earth. For the vast majority of Earth approaching objects that asteroid hunters discover, additional observations make it less and less likely that an object will impact or even make a very close to approach to our home planet. Those few space rocks which have a tiny remote chance of coming very near to us are passed into NASA Sentry system which makes and keeps astronomers aware of nearby objects so that we do not lose track of them.

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Dr. Hannes Gröller and I traveled to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument to install two night sky meters which will enable this wonderful national treasure to become an international dark sky park. Surrounded by vast tracts of unoccupied public land and having an abundance of clear weather the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument and the Cosmic Campground International Dark Sky Sanctuary both in New Mexico are among the best places in the world to view the natural night sky.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered a 33 foot diameter asteroid which has about a 1.1% chance of impacting the Earth on 569 encounters with our planet between 2045 and 2116. Its name is 2017 LD. It is on the list of the most likely objects to strike the Earth in the next hundred years as reported on NASA's Sentry Earth Impact Monitoring table. Even so, given our current data, there is a 98.9% chance that 2017 LD will not enter our atmosphere on any of its close approaches to Earth in the next 100 years.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Vivian Carvajal was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Cepheus with our small but mighty Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when she discovered 2025 JB1.Fortunately on its current path there is zero probability that 2025 JB1 will impact our home planet in the foreseeable future. Further asteroid hunters continue to search for any other large asteroids which might impact Earth so that mitigation efforts would be effective.