Tonight begins an annual treat for skywatchers, the Geminids meteor shower. Our favorite astrophysicist, Summer Ash, tells us where to look and why it's going to be spectacular.
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Another white board! What's it gonna take for Obama to get one too... or swap his teleprompter for some PowerPoint. This FDR radio era is getting a bit old.
Huh? I was just bemoaning the filters at school- I work for a school district- that won't let scienc-y things like a link to the meteor shower through.
Not to fear! with a little enginuuity... (google, to be exact) I found a link that will work. ... now to find video. I live in Vegas, and you have to get pretty far out of town to miss the light pollution.
Whoa! Great information...
Summer, here. Please forgive me on several points:
1) My disheveled appearance. It's been a rough semester.
2) The asteroid is 3 *miles* wide, not 3 meters.
and
3) Gemini is not a skewed with respect to Orion as I've drawn it. That's what I get for doing last minute prep!
Okay, now that's settled - hope you get to see the show!
Ah! I thought it a bit spectacular a spoonful of asteroid (3 meters wide) could produce a headlining fireworks show. Three miles computes. And ya looked great, a bit geeky... I wouldn't want science babes any other way. ;-)
Nice demo. Thanks!
No apologies needed Summer. I brag to my engineer husband that you give the best explanations, even this ole English major understands what you're saying!
Yay, Summer's back!
Disheveled kinda comes with the territory, eh? You look great to me.
Okay, so now I know where Nicholas Cage got his name from in that movie Face Off with John Travolta. He and his brother were named Castor and Pollux Troy in that movie.
Anyways, so where is the (possible) asteroid NOW? If we're running into it's debris field then I'd hate to run into it when its there. 3 miles wide is big enough to do some damage. Anyways, how difficult is it to track its trajectory and get a rough estimate as to it's whereabouts? Also, how do you folks figure it's an asteroid and not a comet? Have we recovered some of the meteorites? Mostly iron I would imagine right?
JPL has a great orbit simulator that you can run forward and backwards in time to visualize the full orbit of the asteroid (full name 3200 Phaethon):
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=3200;orb=1
Is there any chance you guys could post your videos on YouTube in addition to vimeo? Vimeo videos run like crap on my computer and I'd love to be able to watch all of your video content.
try a video downloader to grab the vimeo then they are money
Just warming up a bit while watching the meteor shower. Amazing!
The wacky thing about this is that an asteroid simply shouldn't produce a meteor shower. All the other meteor showers have their sources in comets, where the debris blown off as they melt ends up being dispersed all along their orbit. 3200 Phaeton is supposed to be an asteroid, and I don't believe it has ever been observed to have any cometary features. Observations that showed the asteroid apparently having an outburst near the Sun don't provide enough material to account for all the mass in the debris field.
I love the fact that despite all we know about our solar system today, there are still mysteries that defy explanation, even something as mundane as a meteor shower.
I was led to believe that comet like objects formed closer to the sun during solar system formation. Once the gas nebula compressed those objects were pushed outward into the solar system. Any thoughts that some comet like objects are trapped in the Kuiper Belt? Or what about this, maybe asteroids have cometary nuclei.
I just read some scientists now think 3200 Phaethon has a thick outer crust of interplanetary dust that built up over time. So basically it's a comet wearing an asteroid suit.
What we thought we knew about the formation of the solar system just 5 years ago is basically junk now. With literally hundreds of exoplanets and solar systems to look at, we now realize that formation was a heck of a lot more chaotic than we ever imagined, and that none of the computer models can produce a solar system like we have today without the kind of major planetary wanderings we see in other solar systems. It now appears that the Earth and the rest of the terrestrial planets owe their entire existence to Saturn! Jupiter began wandering in toward the Sun early in the solar system's formative days, much as we see from the numerous hot Jupiters we see in other systems. It would have eventually plunged into the Sun, taking with it the material that made up the terrestrial planets, except it ended up in an orbital resonance with Saturn, which pulled it back out to where it is today. In the process, lots of stuff that was formed in the region between where the Earth is, and where Uranus is now, got tossed around. Phaeton may have an icy layer underneath a layer of dust, but we have never seen any evidence of that kind of outburst since its discovery. I think we will find it hard to solve this one without sending a spacecraft to visit it, and that doesn't seem likely any time soon. It's got an orbit that takes it well inside the orbit of Mercury, meaning it's tough to get any spacecraft to survive in that environment.