Bob Siederer
Oct 14, 2024
Hello again Science Fans!
It has been a busy few weeks, so let’s get right into it.
As you may have heard, there’s a lot going on up in the night sky. The Aurora Borealis has been seen quite far south again, including some sightings in the Bay Area. Alex Filippenko, famed UC Berkeley astronomer, sent this update:
The Sun has been very active the past few weeks, with many big sunspots visible (e.g., https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/sunspots/) plus several energetic solar flares and/or coronal mass ejections. The energetic charged particles from the most recent eruptions have started reaching Earth and are creating auroras (northern and southern lights), after being trapped by Earth’s magnetic field, drifting toward the poles, and colliding with atoms in our atmosphere. Although this geomagnetic storm isn’t as strong as the one that produced auroras on 2024 May 9/10 even at relatively low latitudes such as the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s a chance that a larger fraction of the energetic particles are aimed toward Earth and will create low-latitude auroras.
I encourage you to look at the sky tonight and the next few nights, especially if you live in the northern USA. Auroral intensity is notoriously difficult to predict, and you could get lucky! Indeed, a friend of mine who happens to be in Maine already saw a beautiful aurora (reproduced above). Don’t rely on your eyes alone: take a photo (preferably a few seconds long) and the aurora might be visible. Smart-phone cameras work great. It’s best to look north around 12-1 am, or north/northeast if earlier in the night; try to view from a dark or relatively dark location away from city lights.You can monitor predictions here; activate the animation by clicking on the bottom arrow (but note that only the last few seconds of the animation show a bit of the future prediction): https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast .
Then there’s Comet C2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. Alex again provides some thoughts:
Comet C/2023 A3 Leonard has now conveniently moved from the morning sky to the early-evening sky. To find it, look to the west-southwest shortly after sunset (about 45 minutes) in darkening twilight. In clear skies with a low west-southwest horizon (i.e., not blocked by trees, hills, buildings, or other obstructions — especially the next few nights when the comet is still very low and in bright twilight), the comet’s nucleus might be visible to the unaided eye as a faint and fuzzy “star.” You are much more likely to see it through binoculars; this will reveal the coma and also the short tail. Photographs obtained with a digital camera mounted on a tripod will reveal more of the coma and tail (typical exposure time 4-20 seconds) — but even 3-second exposures with hand-held smartphones should reveal it. You can already find many photos of the comet online (e.g., https://www.space.com/comet-tsuchinshan-atlas-bright-night-sky — that website also provides additional useful information).
The comet survived its closest approach to the Sun on September 27, and it was closest to Earth on Oct. 12. The next two weeks, will be the best opportunity to see it — initially very low in the sky to the right of bright Venus (Oct. 12), then up and to the right of Venus (Oct. 16), and then directly above Venus (Oct. 21). (Venus is generally the brightest object in the sky other than the Sun and Moon.)
See the above diagram (courtesy of Sky & Telescope magazine) to determine where to look. Although the nucleus of the comet should start fading after Oct. 12, the tail will grow longer because our perspective changes, and the comet will also become higher above the western horizon (thus making it visible for a progressively longer time each evening and in darker skies, both of which are important). So, don’t look at it just one evening — keep monitoring the comet!
If you miss seeing this comet the next two weeks, you’ll need to wait about 80,000 years before it returns (but the orbital period is highly uncertain right now). This is why some media articles have called viewing it a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” — a phrase I generally dislike, in this case because there will probably be other reasonably bright comets visible in your future. Some articles have also called it the “comet of the century” — but there will likely be at least one brighter comet by the year 2100, so this too is an exaggeration. Still, Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS could be a really beautiful one — I’m certainly looking forward to watching it develop!
At some point in our education we all learned that the Sun is actually a star and that it will eventually “die” and Earth will be obliterated. I’m sure most of us went home that day very concerned for our future. Astronomers have found an Earth-like planet orbiting a white dwarf star, the same type that our Sun will become once it runs out of hydrogen. So this is a look into the future of our planet. But not to worry, that apocalypse is still about 5 billion years away.
Meanwhile, the Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spotted a 3-star system. Two of the stars race around each other very quickly at 1.8 Earth days, while the third orbits the other 2 every 25 days!
Discoveries like this make our single star with our 8 (or 9) planets and moons seem downright plain and unremarkable. Except ours has life orbiting it, and so far we haven’t found that anywhere else in the Universe.
On Mars, the Perseverance Rover snapped a panorama of some blue volcanic rocks, along with one white one from an ancient lake bed at Mount Washburn. That white one has never been seen before on Mars.
Back in January, the SHERLOC instrument aboard Perseverance ran into a problem, making it inoperative. After some hard work and testing, the team behind SHERLOC brought it back online in June 24.
NASA also released a colorized close-up of Europa’s surface, showing amazing patterns on the frozen surface. This is a reprocessed image from 1998 from the Galileo Orbiter. The Europa Clipper launch was supposed to go up this week, but hurricane Milton caused the launch to be delayed. As I wrote this, it is scheduled for tomorrow, October 14.
The history behind the Europa Clipper project is quite an interesting one – decades long!
The Nobel prizes are being announced and the prize for Physics went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their work on Artificial Intelligence. Hinton is nicknamed the Godfather of AI, but he quit his job with Google in 2023 to speak about the dangers this technology he helped create could produce.
I went to college in Northeast Ohio. I learned about the Cuyahoga River, which, at the time, was horribly polluted. In 1969, it caught on fire, and I vividly remember the news stories about this. The Cuyahoga empties into Lake Erie in Cleveland. If you follow the course of the river backwards, you find its headwaters are not all that far away from its end, but flowing in the opposite direction, away from Lake Erie. It makes a U-turn in Akron, heading towards Lake Erie, and cutting a pretty impressive gorge through the area to get there. This is a good news story, because the Cuyahoga River is now quite clean, and presents a good example of how even the most polluted waterways can be recovered and repaired.
Imagine a structure that has been occupied for at least 34,000 years and is still in use by its occupants. It is a termite colony in a part of Southern Africa!
Hurricane Milton swept across central Florida this week. It went from being a tropical depression to a Category 5 hurricane in a day, an unprecedented strengthening for that short a period of time. It weakened somewhat before coming ashore, and it missed a direct hit on Tampa Bay, although not buy much. How did it grow so strong, so fast? The Gulf of Mexico is much warmer than average. Also, it is late in the hurricane season for storms to form in the Gulf. By this time of year, they usually come off the western coast of Africa, or form in the warm Atlantic around the equator and head west. Early-season hurricanes often form in the Gulf.
Here are some maps showing the development, track, rainfall, and wind speeds from Milton.
Prior to Milton, Hurricane Helene formed in the Gulf, headed into the big curve area of Florida, and continued north, leaving huge amounts of rain in places not used to it. Northwestern North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee were especially hard hit. Friends of mine in NC said their area received between 18 and 30 inches of rain. Fortunately they live up in the mountains. All that water has to go somewhere though, and in mountains that means down to valleys and that’s where the flooding happened. Over 100 bridges in the area are gone. Many homes have creeks to cross from their property to the street, and those homeowners are stranded because the bridges washed away. Roads in the area are at least partially washed out.
Attempts to politicize the governments support of recovery efforts angered me. All of the states in the path of Helene declared emergencies and the Federal government approved those declarations even before the storm arrived. That’s all the states…except Tennessee. Instead, the legislature called for 31 days of prayer and fasting. The governor proclaimed September 27 “a voluntary Day of Prayer & Fasting”. Read more of about this atrocious conduct, and other attempts to rewrite current history, in Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American”
September 29, 2024
Late Friday night, Tennessee House Republican Caucus chair Jeremy Faison posted “President Biden has finally approved [Tennessee governor Bill Lee’s] state of emergency request,” making it sound as if the delay in federal support for the state during the devastation of Hurricane Helene was Biden’s fault. In fact, while Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North C…
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14 days ago · 4230 likes · 572 comments · Heather Cox Richardson
September 30, 2024
One hundred years ago tomorrow, former president Jimmy Carter arrived in the world in Plains, Georgia. According to the Atlanta Constitution of that date, he arrived just after the worst wind and rainstorm of the year passed off to sea. His home state of Georgia, along with North Carolina and Virginia, sustained significant damage, with railroad tracks …
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13 days ago · 4022 likes · 480 comments · Heather Cox Richardson
October 4, 2024
MAGA Republicans are now lying about the federal response to Hurricane Helene in much the same way they lied about Haitian migrants bringing chaos and disease to Springfield, Ohio. Both disinformation efforts are flat-out lies, and both are designed to demonize immigrants. Immigration was the issue Trump was so eager to run on that he demanded Republica…
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9 days ago · 4658 likes · 658 comments · Heather Cox Richardson
I am providing links to her newsletters for October 6, October 7, and October 9 as they all relate to outrageous lies about virtually everything coming from the MAGA Republicans. I urge you all to read her well-researched reports on the day’s news and the historical perspective behind it, especially for those dates. I could have written an entire newsletter just on this, but she does a much better job of reporting about this stuff than I could.
By now you have probably received your ballots for the November General Election. Please vote. Vote for science, and people that support it. Vote for reason and logic, not for innuendo, not for the past, not because your party affiliation tells you to. Think for yourself. But above all, vote.
Have a great week in Science.
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