Bad Astronomy » DeathfromtheSkies!

CSU Pueblo talk January 25

Phil Plait — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:27:50 +0000

Are you in the southern Colorado area? I’ll be in Pueblo, Colorado on the evening of Wednesday January 25th to give my "Bad Astronomy" talk. The talk is at 7:00 p.m. at Hoag Hall on the CSU campus, and is the keynote speech for an all-day Space Exploration Seminar. While the seminar is only for CSU students, my talk is open to the public and free. Free I say!

You can read more about it in The Chieftan, the local newspaper.

The talk is part poking fun at misinformation, part asteroid impact discussion — there’s a lot of the former in the latter, so it all fits together. Plus, I’ll be standing eggs on end! Can there possibly be a better way to spend a Wednesday evening?*

Hopefully, a few days is enough notice to mark your calendars, find babysitters, and hide your valuables. I hope to see some of you there!

* Yes.

Peering down onto an ancient Australian impact

Phil Plait — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:00:36 +0000

When the first episode of Bad Universe aired, my Aussie friends complained about us choosing Sydney as the impact site of a small asteroid. We chose it because most other major cities have already been wiped out in TVs and movies, and the Sydney Opera House was so iconic we knew it would make a great visual (it did).

But as much as my friends complained, they had it easy. Check out this impact site just a few thousand kilometers west of Sydney:

[Click to impactenate.]

That’s Shoemaker (formerly Teague) Crater, an old impact crater about 30 km (19 miles) or so across. It’s a bit tough to see, but it’s the oddly wobbly circular shape right in the middle of this photo. Craters this big are hard to see from the ground, and are easier to identify from space; this shot was taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station. Like many large craters, it has multiple rings around it, probably formed as massive shock waves from the gigantic impact slammed through the ground. There’s a ridge at the bottom of the high-res photo that’s part of a heavily eroded ...

George Hrab in concert: 21812!

Phil Plait — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:30:49 +0000

I’ve known the skeptic, musician, and bepated bon vivant podcaster George Hrab for many years now, and it is truly an honor to call him my friend. He’s smart, wise, a natty dresser, and very, very funny. His music is brilliant, which you already know if you’ve heard it.

And hey! Here’s your chance now: Geo’s throwing a concert! He’s calling it "21812, A Gneiss Night Out", and it’ll be on February 18, 2012 (hence the name) and it will be in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

But he’s had concerts before, I hear you thinking. What’s so special about this one?

Well, for one thing, he’s recording it so he can release a complete DVD of the whole thing, which is pretty cool. And for another, he has invited a special guest, someone so amazing and awesome that no one could possibly resist buying tickets! Sadly though that person couldn’t come so he invited me instead.

That’s right! I’ll be there (w00t!) and we’ll be doing his song "Death from the Skies" (based on my book) live on stage. If you have no clue what I’m talking ...

Talk in Tyler, Texas tonight

Phil Plait — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:02:39 +0000

Sorry for the short notice — I was going to post Monday but the day got away from me — but I’ll be giving my “Death From The Skies!” talk tonight in Tyler, Texas at the Tyler Junior College at 6:30 p.m. You can get the details at the Hudnell Planetarium blog. I hope to see some of you there!

Fireball over Germany

Phil Plait — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 18:38:57 +0000

[UPDATE: Turns out the fireball described below was the re-entry of the Soyuz booster that brought Expedition 30 up to the International Space Station a few days ago. Thanks to Marco Langbroek for alerting me to this!]

[Update 2 (19:08 GMT): More footage, and a picture in a Dutch paper. Tip o' the Whipple Shield to VirtualAstro and JHG Hendriks.]

Reports are coming in of a very bright fireball over Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. It happened around 16:30 GMT (17:30 local time in that part of Europe) on December 24 (just a couple of hours ago as I write this). I heard of it when BA Bloggee Dave Grant sent me a note from Dusseldorf; he got video of it!

If you are in that area and saw it, you can report it to the International Meteor Organization or to The Latest Worldwide Meteor / Fireball Reports (note: I found that last site doing a bit of searching and I’m not familiar with it, so I don’t know how official it may ...

My asteroid impact talk is now on TED!

Phil Plait — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:00:51 +0000

I am extremely honored and pleased to announce that my talk, "An asteroid impact can ruin your whole day", is now featured on the TED website!

I gave this talk in September at TEDxBoulder, and I had a fantastic time. The talks were great, and it was wonderful to be a part of that.

However, I made two errors in this talk. One was logistical; I forgot to say that the "dinosaur space program" line is from science fiction writer Larry Niven, and for that I apologize to him — I usually do credit him, so I’m not sure what happened there.

The second error?

I blew it when I said April 13, 2036 was a Friday! It’s actually a Sunday. When the asteroid Apophis passes on April 13, 2029, though, that’s a Friday. I use that line as a joke — I’m hardly a triskadekaphobe — but I misspoke here. Mea culpa, tempus fugit, et per ardua ad asta.

However, some serious coolness: BA Twitter follower @RossHowell noticed that my video was on the TED iPad app, so I downloaded the app ...

Texas talks OF DEATH

Phil Plait — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:00:51 +0000

I’ll be giving my "Death from the Skies!" twice in Texas next week:

1) First, I’ll be speaking at Rice University in Houston on November 14th at 4:00 p.m. in Herzstein Hall’s amphitheater, then

2) I’ll be at the University of Texas – Pan American on November 15th for a 7:00 p.m. talk at the Student Union Theater. The UTPA event requires registration, so sign up! [Update: another page about the UTPA talk is here.]

The talk is about asteroid and comet impacts, and how one could ruin your whole day. I know there are BABloggees in Texas — you guys come out of the wordwork when I write about The Lone Star State — so come on by!

[Yeehaw!]

Fort Collins, Colorado talk OF DEATH

Phil Plait — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:06:41 +0000

A quick note to folks in the Fort Collins, Colorado area: I’ll be giving my "Death from the Skies!" talk on Thursday, November 3 (tomorrow as I write this) at the Colorado State University campus there. The talk will be at the Lory Student Center East Ballroom at 7:00 p.m.

It’s open to the public [UPDATE: admission is FREE!], so if you’re in the area, come see me show how an asteroid impact can ruin your whole day!

TED x ME

Phil Plait — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:50 +0000

In September 2011, I was honored to be on the speaker roster for TEDxBoulder, which is a local though independently-run version of the much-lauded TED talks. My talk was about saving the Earth from asteroid impacts, something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about.

The talk is online, and I’ve included it here:

The "We have a space program" line is from science fiction author Larry Niven, so I can’t take credit for it, though I modified it to add the "we can vote" bit. Also, this was the biggest audience I’ve ever spoken to, and it was a great crowd. I was almost last on the roster, but the audience was attentive and clearly enjoying themselves. It was a really fun, energizing, and mind-expanding evening.

The other talks that night are being put online as well. If you ever get a chance to attend a local TEDx conference, you should.

Spinning white dwarf bombs may lurk the galaxy

Phil Plait — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:30:59 +0000

Some new research just released asks a question near and dear to me: are there thousands of spinning white dwarfs in our galaxy, just waiting to explode as they gradually slow their rotation?

The answer is very probably yes. Let me be clear, as I always must be when covering topics like this: we’re not in any real danger from these things. Space is vast, and supernovae are few. If these things were that volatile we wouldn’t be here to talk about them in the first place.

But it’s still a very cool scientific question, and actually a fairly simple concept. Here’s how it works.

Imagine a binary system of two stars like the Sun, orbiting each other. One star nears the end of its life, swells up into a red giant, and blows off its outer layers. After a few millions years, all that’s left is its core: a dense, hot ball called a white dwarf. The size of the Earth but with the mass of a star, white dwarfs are pretty weird. They have incredibly strong gravity, which wants to crush them down even further, but they ...

Blastr: So, you wanna blow up the Earth?

Phil Plait — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:00:22 +0000

Blowing up a planet is hard. Really, really, really, really hard. In fact, if you had one "really" in that sentence for every Joule of energy it would take to make the Earth all explodey, you’d need more than 2 x 1032 of them. That’s a lot of "really"s.

I actually calculated that number using some basic physics and math, and then decided to write an entire article around it, which is now up on Blastr. It doesn’t matter how big a supervillain you are, blowing up a planet is next to impossible, despite the non-existence of Ceti Alpha 6.

There are ways of tearing a planet apart, actually, but I didn’t want the article to go on too long, and I figure exploding one versus ripping it apart are different things. Maybe I’ll do a follow up article. And really, why blow it up at all? If you want to kill everything on it, just set up a massive ad campaign for hair spray, sell the inhabitants a billion cans of the stuff, and then sit back and wait for them to destroy their ozone layer. ...

TEDxBoulder, containing me

Phil Plait — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:30:09 +0000

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be giving a presentation at TEDxBoulder on September 24 this year. TEDx events are independently organized from TED, but feature the same sorts of talks: inspiring, entertaining, and designed to help make the world a better place.

My topic? Trying to make the world a better place by preventing an asteroid impact from making it a far, far worse place. The other talks look pretty interesting, including one from Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s brother, and also from Jake Nickell, co-founder of the Threadless t-shirt company. I think this will be a very cool evening.

Tickets are on sale now but I hear it’s filling up quickly, so if you’re in the Boulder area and want to attend, better hurry!

Help me get a panel at SXSW!

Phil Plait — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:00:38 +0000

SXSW (or South by Southwest if you want to make it easier to say out loud) is a major geekapalooza held every year in Austin, Texas. There’s music, film, and lots and lots of tech nerdery. I’ve wanted to go for a long time.

Now’s my chance, but I need your help! I was contacted by Stephanie Smith at JPL who is proposing a panel called "2012: You Bet Your Asteroid the World Won’t End", featuring JPL’s Veronica MacGregor, near-Earth asteroid expert, Don Yeomans, and me. The panel would be about end-of-the-world scenarios, something about which I have plenty of fun things to say.

The thing is, the panels have to be voted on, and that’s where you come in. All you have to do is go to the SXSW panel picker, register (that only takes a sec), and then you can vote for what is undoubtedly the best panel out of the 3285 listed.

If you do, I will love you forever and send you a unicorn*. But please hurry — voting closes at noon Central (US) time on Friday, September 2. Thanks!

Peruvian “meteor” freaks out media

Phil Plait — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:00:17 +0000

A few days ago, the web was abuzz with something that looked like a very large meteor burning up over Peru. Here’s video from ITN news:

You can find similar videos on Youtube. However, is it actually a meteor?

Cutting to the chase, I don’t think so. I don’t have a lot of solid evidence either way, but all signs point that way. Here are my thoughts:

1) Meteors tend to move more quickly. They usually burn up around 100 km (60 miles) up, roughly, and are moving at a minimum of 11 km/sec (7 miles/sec) — Earth’s gravity pulls them in to at least this speed. If you’ve ever seen a meteor you know they zip across the sky in at most a few seconds.

2) The two trains (the technical term for what most people would call the tail or trail) are very odd — you can see them in the frame grab here. I’ve never seen a meteoroid (the actual solid bit moving through our atmosphere) produce more than one train. I don’t think this is an optical effect due to the camera but actually two distinct trains.

3) The ...

No, a new study does not show cosmic-rays are connected to global warming

Phil Plait — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:32:22 +0000

The way some of the media report on climate change can be simply stunning. For example, an opinion piece in The Financial Post has the headline "New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans".

There’s only one problem: that’s completely wrong. In reality the study shows nothing of the sort. The evidence, as far as the limitations of the experiment go (that’s important, see below), do not show any effect of cosmic rays on global warming, and say nothing at all about the effect humans are having on the environment.

What did you do, Ray?

OK, first things first: why should we even think cosmic rays might affect climate? There are several steps to this, but it’s not too hard to explain.

We know that clouds form by water molecules accumulating on seed particles, called condensation nuclei. The physical processes are complex, but these particles (also called aerosols) are suspended in the air and water droplets form around them. The more of them available, the better water can condense and form clouds (although of course this also depends on a lot of ...

Europeans are taking the asteroid threat seriously

Phil Plait — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:30:09 +0000

I’ve been scratching my head for a long time, trying to figure out why NASA hasn’t been taking the idea of preventing asteroid impacts more seriously. This idea has everything you’d want in a project: it’s cool (I mean, c’mon, we’re talking asteroid impacts!), it’s doable, it’s not terribly expensive, it’s already on the public’s mind thanks to Hollywood, and there’s always the eensy-weensy possibility that you might save all of humanity.

Yet, despite this, it’s been an uphill battle to get NASA to pay attention. While the space agency has been very good about supporting early detection programs, the support for a space mission to prevent an impact has been lacking. Of course, given their relatively small budget (<1% of the federal spending) I imagine taking on anything like this would be difficult.

So I’m pretty chuffed that the European Space Agency is looking into saving our collective skins. They’ve being studying the feasibility of a mission to test methods of asteroid impact mitigation, including a very very cool space mission they’ve dubbed Don Quijote (first proposed in 2002, and may launch sometime after ...

A dinosaur dish best served cold

Phil Plait — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:58:07 +0000

Is this the greatest t-shirt idea ever thunk up? Why yes. Yes, it is.

That is Zach Weiner’s latest idea, which he claims is based on this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip, though it’s closer to this one, but of course is in reality based on my book.

And will I be getting one? Duh.

Related posts:

- Save yourself, mammal!
- SMBC on the brain
- So, moving on
- Zach Weiner, Destroyer of Homophobes

New study finds giant impacts aren’t periodic

Phil Plait — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:00:19 +0000

A giant impact from an asteroid or comet can ruin your whole day. Or year. Or, if you’re a dinosaur, your existence.

So astronomers do what they can to understand this menace from space. We look for rocks on orbits that intersect ours, we think about ways of moving them out of the way should we find one, and we also think about the record we do have of past impacts to see what we can learn from them.

There are about 180 impact craters known on our planet, ranging from tens of millennia in age to billions of years. They also vary in size from a few kilometers across to monsters so big they can only be detected from space. Sometimes it’s hard to measure their size (they can have multiple concentric rings, or be underground — covered up due to extreme age — making definite sizes hard to figure out) or hard to get their age. But we do have some statistics on them, and there have been many studies about them.

A big question is: are impacts periodic? That is, do they happen with some repeating period? If so, ...

New meteor shower points to a future close encounter

Phil Plait — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:00:13 +0000

A pair of astronomers monitoring an all-sky camera got a surprise (PDF) when they checked data from last February: a half dozen meteors all seemed to come from the same spot in the sky, indicating they all had a common origin. After doing some calculations, they found that they probably come from a parent comet with an orbit that’s at least 53 years long. Moreover, the orbit of this comet crosses that of the Earth, meaning we may have a close encounter with this object sometime in the future.

And because I can sense the oncoming panic on the web over this news, let me break it down for you. I’ll give you the science (which is cool), how we know this unseen comet may be potentially, um, interesting, then the reason you don’t need to run around in circles screaming (spoiler: it’s rude to others nearby, but also unnecessary).

But just to be up front: should you panic? Nope. We know there are objects out there that could hit us in the future sometime. This comet is in many ways just another one. As I’ll point out below, we pass ...

RV-sized asteroid will buzz the Earth on Monday

Phil Plait — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 12:48:54 +0000

A rock about 10 meters in size will fly past the Earth Monday at 13:30 UTC (09:30 Eastern US time) 17:01 UTC (13:01 Eastern US time) [Note: the time of closest approach was updated this morning, June 27]. It’ll be a particularly close shave — passing just 12,400 km (7430 miles) from Earth’s surface; a bit less than the diameter of the Earth itself — but it’ll miss for sure.

[Update 2: Images and an animation of the asteroid are now up at the Remanzacco Observatory blog; thanks to NickAstronomer on Twitter for the tip!]

We’re in no danger from the asteroid, named 2011 MD, since there’s essentially zero chance it will hit us. Even if it did, it’s too small to impact the surface, and would instead break apart and burn up in the atmosphere. That would be exciting, and make quite a show, but that’s about it.

Here’s a diagram of the asteroid’s trajectory (note that the size of the Earth is not to scale!):

On this scale, the Earth is actually ...

Are we headed for a new ice age?

Phil Plait — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:02:00 +0000

Much ado was made over the recent news that the Sun’s magnetic activity may be cooling off over the next few years. Can this mean the Earth itself will literally cool off, slipping into an ice age? Some news sites are reporting it that way (of course, the execrable Daily Mail uses the headline "Earth facing a mini-Ice Age ‘within ten years’ due to rare drop in sunspot activity"; which isn’t even within a glancing blow of reality).

The answer — spoiler alert! — is almost certainly "no". I want to make sure that’s clear, because I will bet essentially any amount of money that some climate change denial sites will run with this story and claim that we don’t need to worry about global warming. That’s baloney, and what follows is why. The reasons take a minute to explain, but of course that’s where the cool stuff (haha!) is. So let’s take this one step at a time. And if you have the attention span of an E. coli bacterium, you can skip down to the conclusion section.

[Note: a lot of ...

Mashup of DEATH!

Phil Plait — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Perhaps you’ve seen the video of George Hrab and me performing his song "Death from the Skies". And perhaps you’ve seen my own show, "Bad Universe".

Now, thanks to Dana Peters, you can see them together:

After all, these are the real ways the world will end.

The Sun may be headed for a little quiet time

Phil Plait — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:01:20 +0000

Is the solar cycle shutting down?

New results indicate it may very well be, at least temporarily. Even though the Sun is currently approaching the peak of its cycle in 2013, and we’re seeing an increase in activity (more sunspots, flares, and other violent events), there are strong signs that the next expected peak (in 2022 or later) may be weaker, or may not come at all!

Here’s the deal. The Sun is a seething ball of ionized gas, called plasma, and has very complex magnetic fields that interact with this plasma. The overall strength and activity from the magnetic field rises and falls on roughly an 11 year cycle. When the cycle is at its minimum the field strength is weak, and we see few or no sunspots or other activity. Then, a little over five years later, the cycle peaks and there’s lots of fun stuff going on, with flares, coronal mass ejections, and more.

Scientists studying the Sun have been trying to figure out this cycle for over a century. It’s very complex, but as technology has gotten better, some trends have been found. And recently, ...

Most distant object ever seen… maybe

Phil Plait — Wed, 25 May 2011 18:07:40 +0000

Is this the most distant object ever seen?

[Click to deathfromtheskiesenate.]

That is GRB 090429B, a gamma-ray burst (or just GRB to those who want to sound nerdcool), the catastrophic and extremely violent detonation of a massive star. Think of it as a super-supernova, the death throes of a star that lived a short, hot, turbulent life. I wrote about them extensively in my book "Death from the Skies!", or you can get the details about how they form and why they’re so awesome in an earlier post.

Its distance is estimated to be a whopping 13.14 billion light years. If this holds up, it may be the single most distant object ever seen by humans.

But is this really a record-breaker? And why aren’t we sure? OK, this takes a wee bit o’ explaining, but I think you’ll like it. After all, it’s an explosion so big it’ll crush your mind into dust.

[UPDATE: Due to a typo in my math notes early on, I incorrectly said the distance to this burst was 13.4 billion light years. D'oh! I have corrected all the numbers below, and I ...

Supernovae popping off like firecrackers in Carina

Phil Plait — Tue, 24 May 2011 16:47:49 +0000

The Carina nebula is a sprawling, monstrous complex of gas located a mere 7500 light years from Earth. Hundreds of light years across, it’s massive enough to create thousands of stars like the Sun. Tens of thousands.

And churn out stars it does. Embedded in the nebula are several clusters of newborn stars, and many of these stars are so massive they’re nearly at the limit of how big a star can be without tearing itself apart. Stars that big explode as supernovae, and a new mosaic by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory indicate they’ve been popping off in the nebula for quite some time:

[Click to enchandrasekharlimitenate.]

This image is pretty amazing: it’s a mosaic of 22 separate images by Chandra, covering 1.4 square degrees (seven times the area of the full Moon on the sky), and represents an exposure time of 1.2 million seconds! Since it shows X-rays coming from astronomical objects, it’s false color: red is from lower energy X-rays, green is medium energy, and blue from the highest energy photons.

The diffuse glow is from two sources: the stellar winds from those massive stars slamming into ...