Posts

May 17, 2013

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9:01 PM | Explosion on the Moon! Pock-marked with craters and splotched...

Explosion on the Moon! Pock-marked with craters and splotched with long-cold beds of dark lava, our moon holds thousands of footprints from its violent past. But we don’t really think of it having a violent present. Well, it still gets its fair share of action. On March 17, 2013, NASA astronomers captured video of a meteorite striking the moon. It made an explosion bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, like a temporary star drawn on the lunar surface. It turns out that these collisions […]

May 09, 2013

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2:54 PM | explore-blog: Remarkable animated visualization of every...

explore-blog: Remarkable animated visualization of every meteorite since 861 AD from The Guardian. (ᔥ Open Culture) This is awesome! It really hits “death from the skies” level near the end. Which, coincidentally, is the name of a book by Bad Astronomer Phil Plait all about the science behind the ways the world might end (and the ways that it most certainly won’t … like Planet X) There’s no reason to think that we really have more meteorites hitting Earth these days, like you see […]

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12:14 PM | Top 10 Headlines Today: Moth Has Best Hearing, Mysteryious ‘Eternal Flames’…

The top 10 stories on our radar today: Scientists discover that a moth has the best hearing in the animal kingdom, geologists study the mystery behind Earth's 'eternal flames,' and...

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12:14 PM | Top 10 Headlines Today: Moth Has Best Hearing, Mysterious ‘Eternal Flames’…

The top 10 stories on our radar today: Scientists discover that a moth has the best hearing in the animal kingdom, geologists study the mystery behind Earth's 'eternal flames,' and...

May 08, 2013

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1:42 AM | Eta Aquarid meteors over New Zealand this week, photographed by...

Eta Aquarid meteors over New Zealand this week, photographed by Stephen Voss over the course of 90 minutes. Every spring, Earth crosses the orbital trail of Halley’s Comet. While we’ll have to wait until 2061 to see the actual comet again (I am old enough to remember seeing it back in 1986, though, so nah!), each year we get a fresh sprinkling of comet tail dust into our atmosphere at 150,000 mph. As Earth whips through, the debris appears to radiate out from the constellation Aquarius, […]

May 05, 2013

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3:09 AM | To See Pieces Of Halley’s Comet, Just Look Up!

It happens every year around now, and this year should peak on May 5th at approximately 9pm EDT (in the wee hours of May 6th if you’re on GMT). Little pieces of material that once belonged to the nucleus of Halley’s Comet will zip into our atmosphere as meteors. The Eta Aquarids (so-called because the [...]

May 02, 2013

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7:41 PM | Tunguska Mystery Solved By Three Tiny Stones?

A Russian scientist claims to have found three tiny meteorite samples from the 1908 Tunguska event. Did they really originate from the historic fireball? Continue reading →

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3:00 PM | Finally! Fragments from Tunguska explosion supposedly found

They look like melted droplets, found in a nearby river and sat for 20 years before he figured out that they were indeed VERY interesting. First Tunguska Meteorite Fragments Discovered | MIT Technology Review. The Tunguska impact event is one of the great mysteries of modern history. The basic facts are well known. On 30 June 1908, a vast and powerful explosion engulfed an isolated region of Siberia near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. The generally accepted theory is that the explosion […]

April 30, 2013

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6:17 PM | Big booms over the northland

by Ned Rozell Near a small village in Russia, Marina Ivanova stepped into cross-country skis and kicked toward a hole in the snow. The meteorite specialist with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and Vernadsky Institute in Moscow was hunting for fragments of the great Chelyabinsk Meteorite that exploded three days earlier. This search was different from others. Ivanova has looked for metallic stones on the world’s great deserts and in Antarctica, places where heavenly rocks stand out […]

April 26, 2013

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1:28 AM | Booming meteor remains hit home in Connecticut

A mysterious booming occurred in Connecticut on Friday, April 19. Houses shook, windows rattled and people said they saw a flash. It turns out this was a meteor and THEY FOUND IT! Officials confirm meteorite hit Wolcott home – CBS 5 – KPHO. Officials at the Yale Peabody Museum confirmed that a meteorite struck a home in Wolcott at the end of last week. “She told me and I made her repeat it like four times because I’m like, ‘A rock?’” said Wendy Taylor. […]

April 24, 2013

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6:05 AM | Asteroid to meteorite

Asteroid to meteorite

April 01, 2013

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2:27 PM | April 1st: Astronomy Cast : Shock Waves

Podcaster: Fraser Cain and Dr Pamela Gay Title: Astronomy Cast Ep. 291 : Shock Waves Organization: Astronomy Cast – http://www.astronomycast.com. Link : http://youtu.be/izbVSnZBDQM Description: As a meteor crashed into the atmosphere above Russia, the world discovered the importance of shock waves; how they’re caused and how they propagate through the atmosphere. Today we’ll discuss the topic in general and find many examples where shock waves can be created, here on Earth, and […]

March 25, 2013

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12:15 AM | Iceland Hits the Links, New Jersey Bugs Out, America Loves Cheese Powder

By The Editors Friday Night Lights: About a month after a huge 56-foot meteor exploded over Russia, the American sky hosted its own light show this weekend. A boulder-size space rock shot across the Northeast on Friday, igniting more than 1,000 eye-witness reports from North Carolina to Maine. You can see the meteor in this security video (sorry, no dashboard cams this time). EarthSkyFore!: The plans of a Chinese tycoon to build an “eco golf course” […]

March 19, 2013

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1:41 PM | March 19th: Airburst Events Explained

Podcaster: Dr. David Kring and Nancy Atkinson Title: Airburst Events Explained Organization: NASA Lunar Science Institute Links: NLSI Music: “Amelia” by Ben Bedford from his “Land of the Shadows” CD. http://benbedford.com/ Description: An asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere early Friday, February 15, 2013 over Chelyabinsk, Russia. It exploded and broke apart about 20 km above Earth’s surface, producing an energy shockwave that caused damage to the city below. […]

March 08, 2013

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2:03 PM | March 8th: Weekly Space Hangout: Geological Implications of Russian Meteor

Podcaster: Fraser Cain, Thad Szabo, Nancy Atkinson, Scott Lewis, Alan Boyle, Amy Shira Teitel, Emily Lakdawalla, and special guest Heather Hanna Title: Weekly Space Hangout: Geological Implications Russian Meteor Organization: Cosmoquest Link : http://cosmoquest.org You can watch the video in: http://youtu.be/NYAkvEMKVDg Description: This week we talk about the geological implications of Russian meteor strike. Bio: Fraser Cain is a publisher in Universe Today ; Thad Szabo from Cerritos […]

February 27, 2013

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1:57 AM | Name That Space Rock The difference between a comet, asteroid,...

Name That Space Rock The difference between a comet, asteroid, meteoroid, meteor and meteorite, by narwhalbot on Flickr. Now you know.

February 26, 2013

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2:30 PM | Cosmic coincidence and why science matters

On February 15, 2013 two extraordinary cosmic events coincided. An asteroid made a fly-by while a meteor put on a show. Science says we don’t have to run and hide. … Continue reading →

February 21, 2013

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5:09 PM | Infrasound Takes a Bow

Last week's events pushed the obscure subject of infrasound into the news. That was music to my science-obsessed ears.

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5:00 PM | What The Russian Meteor Explosion Sounded Like

Infrasound Array This was one of the infrasound arrays in Greenland that detected the Chelyabinsk meteorite on Friday. CTBTO, via wikimedia commons Last week was a busy one for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, a detection agency set up to identify nations when they test nuclear weapons banned by treaty. On Tuesday, the organization's seismographs detected a rumble in North Korea that could only have been an atomic test. Then on Friday, CTBTO infrasound sensors picked up an […]

February 20, 2013

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6:01 PM | Spectacular meteor hazard in Russia

The recent passage of a massive meteor in Russia is quite a unique and unusual hazard. Hazards from outer space have received some attention from the UK government (who included space weather in the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies) and elsewhere, but some of the more obvious ones like meteors, comets or even asteroids [...]

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6:00 PM | The 4 Best Conspiracy Theories About The Russian Meteorite

Chelyabinsk meteor trace Alex Alishevskikh, via Wikimedia CommonsLast week's meteorite impact: cosmic coincidence, or a sign of the Mayan apocalypse? Brush up on the nuttiest theories floating around the Web. When something as mundane as a birth certificate is major conspiracy-theory fodder, it should be no surprise that the folks in tin foil hats have already concocted some not-so-obvious explanations for last week's meteorite crash in Russia. Read on for our four favorite space-rock […]

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5:45 PM | Could Another Chelyabinsk-Scale Meteor Sneak Up on Us?

When a 17-meter asteroid barreled into Earth’s atmosphere over central Russia on February 15, releasing a powerful shock wave that injured more than 1,000 people, many observers wondered how such a momentous event could arrive unheralded. The fact is, the object that exploded in a fireball over Chelyabinsk, releasing hundreds of kilotons of energy, was [...]

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3:40 PM | Of Charged Discs, Trig Substitutions, Birds, and Fireballs

In studying form my EM midterm, I came across a practice problem involving finding the potential along the z axis due to a charged disc centered on the same axis. After thinking about the problem a bit, I turned to what's becoming one of my favorite online references, Dr. J.B. Tatum's text on electricity and magnetism[2]. Sure enough, there was a solution that could be adapted to the task at hand. It involved several 'clever' trig substitutions one of which were not […]

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1:17 PM | Video Analysis of the Russian Meteor

I was originally going to use a video similar to the shot from above. It shows a moving shadow from the intensely bright meteor. Well, it seems someone beat me to it. Ogle Earth: Reconstructing the Chelyabinsk meteor’s path, with ...

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12:00 PM | Just for fun: Meteors

On February 15th, a large meteor fell near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, which is located just east of the Ural Mountains. Although spectacular, it did cause a fair amount of damage, including over a thousand injuries and many broken windows.Here's a compilation video of the meteor including some of the aftermath:More on this at Bad Astronomy and at The Guardian.Meanwhile, that same day another meteor was seen near San Francisco:Luckily, this one didn't cause any […]

February 19, 2013

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11:33 PM | Russian Meteor: A Cosmic Flesh Wound

Friday's historic meteor airburst over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, gave the unlikely statistics of being hit by space rocks a very human twist. ->

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3:43 PM | Detecting nuclear explosions – plus meteors, tsunamis, and more

It was a busy week for the seismometers, ocean-monitoring acoustic stations and other instruments associated with the preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization – or CTBTO – monitoring rogue nuclear tests worldwide. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston on Sunday, researchers showed that the 288-instrument CTBTO array can tackle scientific research as well as nuclear detective work.

February 18, 2013

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7:57 PM | See an Asteroid, Capture a Meteor! It’s been said by many...

See an Asteroid, Capture a Meteor! It’s been said by many that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”. Australian photographer Colin Legg has proven that true. He set out to capture last Friday’s fly-by from asteroid 2012 DA14 and accidentally caught with a burning meteor entry. Think about it! You set up your camera to capture something well-planned and expected, and out of nowhere you see a burning fireball rush through your field of view, complete with its wispy […]

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1:13 PM | Why Does a Meteor Explode in the Air?

Let me start our meteor discussion with a comment Dear Russians. I am sorry so many of you were injured and sustain property damage. However, I am very thankful for your abundance of car mounted video cameras. Keep up the ...

February 17, 2013

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1:35 PM | Image of the week: Falling Skies

Last Friday a meteor hit Russia injuring more than a thousand people. It is thought that the meteor was around 15 meters wide, weighed approximately 7,000 tonnes and was falling at a speed of about 65,000 km/h. It was the biggest meteor impact since 1908 and the energy released in the impact was far more powerful than the nuclear test … Continue reading →