Asteroids

Asteroid 2023 BU’s trajectory is in red (WSJ illustration)

An asteroid flew by earth today, missing it by a mere 2,200 miles:

An asteroid the size of a big truck will fly by Earth on Thursday just 2,200 miles above the planet’s surface in one of the closest approaches ever recorded, scientists said.

The asteroid, named 2023 BU, will travel over the Pacific Ocean west of southern Chile, Thursday afternoon Pacific time, according to Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The near-Earth object poses no danger, and there is no expected impact...

Had it entered Earth’s orbit, the asteroid would have burned upon entry and, at its small size, turned into a fireball. “It’s not going to get close enough for that,” said Dr. Farnocchia.

What's alarming to this non-astronomer is that the object was detected on January 21st, less than a week ago.

I hope that larger asteroids that could possibly cross earth's path are being tracked, but experience tells us that we don't know about all of them.

The late Stephen Hawking's principal worry was that an asteroid strike would end life on earth:

“There are thousands of really large asteroids, some are over ten miles long – the size of Manhattan.

“An asteroid this size hits the Earth [every] 100,000,000 years.

“The last one struck the Earth 65,000,000 years ago, and probably was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs.

“We don’t know when the next asteroid will strike, but if it’s big enough, it could sterilise our planet.

“That would be the end of the five billion year story of life on Earth.”

Sweet dreams!

Changing Our View

Eclipsing our differences (WSJ image)

For time immemorial our species has stood in awe of nature. And that emotion, psychologists aver, affects behavior toward others:

A new paper in the journal Psychological Science, by Sean Goldy, Nickolas Jones and Paul Piff at the University of California, Irvine, suggests there is at least one psychological way that celestial events can indeed influence us. When people gaze up at an awesome sight like an eclipse, the researchers conclude, they become more humble and caring when they look down at their Twitter feed.

The researchers took off from earlier studies that Dr. Piff did with Dacher Keltner and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. In one study, people were shown videos of earthbound awe-inspiring sights like a towering tree, a sublime landscape or an erupting volcano. Afterwards they felt less significant themselves and more caring toward others.

In another study, researchers placed students in front of either the majestic Berkeley Eucalyptus Grove or a tall but boring campus building. A confederate then came by and dropped a bunch of pens on the ground, apparently by accident. The awe-struck students in the grove put more effort into helpfully collecting the dropped pens than did the students by the mundane building.

December, 1972: Apollo 17's "Blue Marble"

Additional support for the Awe => Humility => Caring connection came from a comparison of millions of tweets from those who were in the path of an eclipse and those who were not.

they also used more words expressing social connection, like “care” “love” and “thanks,” and they expressed more humility and tentativeness, saying “maybe” or “perhaps.”

The second age of space travel does not seem to be as marred with criticism as space travel was during the Sixties. As mankind slips the surly bonds of earth and explores the wondrous, dangerous, and awe-ful universe, perhaps human beings will be prompted to set aside their differences and be more aware of how much they have in common with each other.

Dark Beginnings

(Illustration from EarthSky)

One question I have zero expertise in answering:

Black holes and dark matter — are they one and the same? [bold added]

If most of the primordial black holes were “born” [after the Big Bang] at a size roughly 1.4 times the mass of Earth’s sun, they could potentially account for all dark matter, said Yale professor of astronomy and physics Priyamvada Natarajan, the paper’s theorist.

Natarajan and her colleagues say their new model shows that the first stars and galaxies would have formed around black holes in the early universe. Also, she said, primordial black holes would have had the ability to grow into supermassive black holes by feasting on gas and stars in their vicinity, or by merging with other black holes...

“Our study shows that without introducing new particles or new physics, we can solve mysteries of modern cosmology from the nature of dark matter itself to the origin of super-massive black holes,” [Miami physics professor Nico] Cappelluti said.

Primordial black holes also may resolve another cosmological puzzle: the excess of infra-red radiation, synced with X-ray radiation, that has been detected from distant, dim sources scattered around the universe. Natarajan and her colleagues said growing, primordial black holes would present “exactly” the same radiation signature.

Best of all, the existence of primordial black holes can be proven — or disproven — in the near future, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope and ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission announced for the 2030s.

Major discoveries are occurring in every field of science at a rapid rate, thanks to the development of tools like the Webb Space Telescope. That's a good reason for us Boomers to stay sentient as long as possible, just to see what happens.

In the Book of Genesis readers rush past the beginning where everything is formless, void, and dark in order to get to the light and the creation of the world. It appears that the study of darkness would be very much worth our while.

Before You Can Simulate the Universe, You Have to Map It

Perlmutter is named after Berkeley Lab’s Nobel
Prize-winning astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter.(WSJ)

A powerful supercomputer will use artificial intelligence to map the universe in 3-D:

The real power of Perlmutter, Dr. Bailey said, will come into play as the data starts to build up and researchers begin creating maps to judge their progress. Processing a year’s worth of the data, for example, would take weeks with an existing supercomputer, Dr. Bailey said.

However, Perlmutter—which will be shared with other research teams working on other scientific projects—should be able to accomplish the task in a matter of days...

HPE says the NERSC computer has a peak AI performance, or speed, of almost four “AI exaflops,” which the company said would make the machine the fastest AI supercomputer to date. An AI exaflop is roughly mathematically equivalent to performing 250 petaflops per second, it said. A petaflop is 1,000 trillion, or one quadrillion, operations per second.

Today's smartphone is more powerful than all of NASA's computers used for the moon landing. Perlmutter will seem as primitive to data scientists 50 years from now as NASA's computers appear to us today.

Given the speed that computing power is progressing, we may soon have the power to populate this 3-D map of the universe with beings who think they are "conscious." Of course, that doesn't have to mean anything about our world.

Moon over Foster City

There are high-res close-ups of this morning's super-blood-flower moon, and you won't find them here, dear reader.

I woke at 4:15 a.m. and snapped this photo of the moon over a neighbor's house. He has more lights on than normal. Perhaps he's gazing up, too.

Coming Together at Night

The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that we noted earlier was visible last night with the naked eye.

The planets appeared in the west just above the roof of a house in our cul-de-sac. We spent 15 minutes in the cold night air, as did many of our neighbors, spaced appropriately of course.

Although it's possible that the "Great Conjunction" of the two largest planets in the solar system was the Star of Bethlehem mentioned in the New Testament, other heavenly phenomena that occurred near the time of Jesus' birth make it unlikely.

Nevertheless, as the ancients might have experienced two thousand years ago, we felt a feeling of hope for better times as we looked at the lights in the sky.

Note: the Chronicle captured the image near Coit Tower.

A Special Winter Solstice

(WSJ photo by Chris McGrath)

In this remarkable year Monday will not only be the winter solstice but also the day of a rare celestial event: [bold added]

Jupiter and Saturn will appear to nearly touch in the night sky on the winter solstice this Monday, in a rare alignment that has happened only twice since the Middle Ages...

The two worlds will appear so close on Dec. 21 that they will resemble a double planet, separated by a distance equal to only one-fifth the diameter of the full Moon—about a dime’s thickness—as seen from Earth, astronomers say. They will be visible just above the western horizon during the hour after sunset almost world-wide in the days before and after they make their closest approach on the solstice.

The science-minded may well dismiss the rare alignment as nothing more than a specific view of two planets from the perspective of Earth, signifying nothing.

Still, the perspective of this planet is the only one we have, and tomorrow the view happens to be special. We'll be gazing upward, just for a while.

Its Name Was Its Destiny

In news that you may have missed, one planet in our solar system is covered with sewer gas clouds. Of course, that planet is Uranus.

a study in Nature Astronomy reveal[ed] that the cloud tops of Uranus are made principally of hydrogen sulfide, the gas that is principally responsible for the foul smell of rotten eggs and, yes, human flatulence.

Some mainstream publications described the finding more crudely.

Scientists finally confirm that Uranus is surrounded by fart clouds https://t.co/EUG9OvjCBt pic.twitter.com/Kk9NeCbDJs

— Popular Science (@PopSci) April 24, 2018

I like it when they use accessible language.

Quiet Evening

The lagoon at night (Flickr-A. Tsai)

Lately I've been taking nighttime strolls. After 9 p.m the traffic is almost non-existent--as is crime, by the way--in our Peninsula town-cum-island. Initially I loaded my iPhone with podcasts to pass the time but have recently preferred light jazz, classical, or no sound at all.

The rhythms of the walk, and the sounds of breathing, elicit clarity.

Astrophysicist Alan Lightman also wanders about Pole Island, Maine, "searching for stars".

“If one listens,” he tells us, “there’s always music on this island. The waves rolling into the shore make cascades of sound, sometimes regular rhythms and sometimes duples and triples and offbeat syncopations—all set against the arpeggios and glissandos of the birds.”

Mr. Lightman has his feet on the ground and cannot bring himself to conclude that God exists absent hard evidence. Nevertheless, he laments “I wish I believed.” He might be surprised to learn how often believers say the same thing.

Blue Moon, You Saw Me Standing Alone

iPhone 6 pic from our backyard in Foster City

Like some of our neighbors, we woke up at 5:15 AM to check out the "super blue blood lunar eclipse".

The viewing of the super moon was anticlimactic. Like other events in life, IMHO, it was over-hyped.

But that's what I also thought about last August's solar eclipse until people who saw it live assured me that it was special.

Let's hope the surprises in astronomy continue to be good.

"Moon over the City" (SF Chronicle) beats "Moon over my backyard"

Where the Sun Doesn't Shine

One friend is going to Shoshoni, WY but he won't stay for
the antique tractor show.

We know at least three different parties who are going to see the total solar eclipse on Monday. Our friends and relatives will be heading to small towns in Oregon and Wyoming (Nashville is the only major city in the eclipse path) and roughing it with possibly no GPS, cellphone service, or credit cards (terminals may be down).

Community officials are trying to get visitors prepared. Ms. Hammon, the Idaho Falls spokeswoman, said eclipse-watchers should prepare for traffic delays and bring food, water, medications—and even paper maps because of expected spotty cell service because the area’s reception will be taxed by the crowds.

Rental fees for cars, hotel rooms, and even portable toilets have skyrocketed.

Thousands of dollars will be spent per eclipse-watcher, and your humble blogger can think of only one other 2½-minute experience that could command those prices, but this is a family blog.

As for me, at the same time I'll be headed away from the noise and haste over the Pacific to visit family in the old hometown.

Astronomical Privilege

Boston Globe: The solar eclipse path will overwhelmingly pass over Trump Country

The path of ideal viewing spots for this month’s highly-anticipated total solar eclipse cuts overwhelmingly through places that voted for President Trump in November.

There are about 240 counties roughly along the central path of the eclipse, a 70-mile-wide trail extending across the country where people will be able to see a total eclipse, meaning the sun will appear completely obscured by the moon.

And about 92 percent of those counties swung in Trump’s favor, while fewer than two dozen counties voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Trump won many of those counties by a wide margin, securing an average of 71 percent of the vote in counties he won along the path. Clinton, by comparison, got only about 56 percent of the vote in counties she won along the eclipse path.

And of the more than 6.2 million votes cast in those counties for one of those two candidates, 59 percent were for Trump, while 41 percent were for Clinton.

Is the solar eclipse throwing shade at Hillary Clinton supporters? https://t.co/h4aXugEGDA pic.twitter.com/pYMEmsvq1m

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) August 2, 2017

Fake Science

Ptolemaic system: forcing the data to fit the theory (emaze.com)

In the Ptolemaic system the Earth was at the center of the universe. The heavenly bodies were thought to move in perfect circles, though from the Earth's perspective they clearly did not. Ptolemy added "eccentricity" and "epicycles" to his theory to not only explain but predict the movements of the sun, moon, stars, and planets. The theory sufficed for over a thousand years.

As observations became more accurate in the 15th century, tweaks were added to the Ptolemaic system to fit the data to the model, which finally collapsed under its own complexity and the rise of the superior predictive heliocentric model.

While the historical parallel isn't exact, climate-change models are in the same state as Ptolemy's was, that is, they are unable to explain or predict Earth's temperature with any reliability. Only through tweaking and adjustments are the models able to explain what happened in the past.

Two factors, the sun (obvious) and cloud cover (not so obvious) appear to have a far more important effect on global temperatures than carbon dioxide. Arguing that man-made CO2 is the primary factor in global warming could be as mistaken as claiming that the Earth is the center of the universe.

Even if global temperatures are rising, it's far from clear that the world overall would be worse off; for example, a little warming might be appreciated in Northern Canada and Siberia.

Also, if global cooling instead of global warming has greater than a remote possibility, it's more practical to spend $billions on increasing society's adaptability to change in either direction, rather than place all bets on curtailing carbon dioxide.

But then again I'm no scientist.

Unexpected Finding

Hot

Not (ebay image)

NASA's 9-year Pluto mission has produced an unexpected finding:

Amazingly, there are no craters at all in this image. None. That means the surface must be young, having been resurfaced quite recently. The scientists on New Horizons figure the terrain must be less than 100 million years old, but that’s a guess.

there is no tidal stress [from Pluto's moon Charon]. What could be heating Pluto so that its surface is young? Radioactivity from rocks beneath the surface? It’s hard to say just yet. We have a Plutonian mystery on our hands.

Not on the Horizon

Centaurus A, where galaxies collide (NASA photo)

Scientists have discovered (bold added)

a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other more closely than any ever before observed.

Other twin black holes won’t merge for another few billion years, but these, says Caltech’s George Djorgovski, co-author of a paper in Nature describing the new discovery, “could merge in a mere million years.”

Centaurus A is 11 million light-years away (Andromeda, the closest galaxy to our Milky Way, is 2.5 million light-years from Earth), which means that we are watching events from 11 million years ago; the two black holes have likely already merged.

Unlike Comsat in the 1960's, however, there is no technology on the horizon that will eliminate this tape delay.