Earth Approaching Objects : December 13th, 2015

     

NASA Confirms 60 feet Asteroid is on Course for a Close Encounter with Earth

nemesis maturity

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Published on Dec 13, 2015

It's hurtling through space at 35,000 miles per hour and this 60 feet space rock will have a very close encounter with earth Asteroid 2015 XY261, which was first observed on December 12, 2015, will pass within 0.8 lunar distances (the distance between Earth and the Moon) of Earth. The space rock is going to pass very close to our planet with a Condition code of 7 - MPC "U" parameter: orbit uncertainty estimate 0-9, with 0 being good, and 9 being highly uncertain. There are currently 8 known NEO asteroids discovered that will pass with less than 10 LD's up to the end of this month. Two mountain-sized asteroids will safely pass on Dec, 24th and 29th. http://lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot... http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr... http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch/ While confirming that the asteroid is not a threat to Earth, scientists say that if the asteroid were on course to impact earth it would cause a multimegaton atmospheric explosion over Earth’s surface, rather than impacting it. It potentially would be quite damaging (and even lethal) out to distances of 20 to 40 kilometers in all directions if it happened over a populated region with weak structures. There is a roughly 50 percent chance of a 30-meter-plus asteroid striking Earth each century, according to NLSI team member Clark Chapman, space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Please report your meteor sightings to this website for posting- Remember IF you are looking for a report and no one reports then everyone lacks information; thank you. http://lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot... Music credit: Impact Prelude by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-... Artist: http://incompetech.com/

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All Sky Fireball Network

Every night, a network of NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.

On Dec. 13, 2015, the network reported 29 fireballs.
(15 Geminids, 10 sporadics, 2 December Monocerotids, 1 Quadrantid, 1 alpha Canis Majorid)

In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]

Near Earth Asteroids

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.

On December 13, 2015 there were potentially hazardous asteroids.

Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:

Asteroid	Date(UT)	Miss Distance	Size
2015 XU169	Dec 10	9.5 LD	16 m
1998 WT24	Dec 11	10.9 LD	1.1 km
2015 XA169	Dec 12	7.4 LD	15 m
2015 XR169	Dec 13	1.3 LD	8 m
2015 XX128	Dec 14	2.4 LD	25 m
2015 XX169	Dec 14	8.4 LD	14 m
2015 XN55	Dec 15	2.5 LD	15 m
2015 XY261	Dec 15	0.8 LD	16 m
2015 XL261	Dec 17	9.7 LD	42 m
2015 XE1	Dec 19	13.2 LD	29 m
2015 XN261	Dec 23	2.6 LD	31 m
2011 YD29	Dec 24	9.7 LD	24 m
2003 SD220	Dec 24	28.4 LD	1.8 km
2008 CM	Dec 29	22.8 LD	1.5 km
2004 MQ1	Jan 2	55.4 LD	1.1 km
1999 JV6	Jan 6	12.6 LD	410 m
1685 Toro	Jan 22	60.9 LD	1.7 km
2001 XR1	Jan 23	74.4 LD	1.5 km
2015 VC2	Jan 28	5.8 LD	15 m

Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach.

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Hubble Space Telescope has produced this beautiful image of the inner parts of the distant galaxy NGC 7252.

NGC 7252: Hubble Captures Image of Atoms for Peace Galaxy

Dec 7, 2015 by Sergio Prostak

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced this beautiful image of the inner parts of the distant galaxy NGC 7252.

This image shows the central regions of the peculiar galaxy NGC 7252. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Judy Schmidt, www.geckzilla.com.

NGC 7252, also known as LEDA 68612 or Arp 226, is a 12.7 magnitude peculiar galaxy in the constellation Aquarius.

It is about 212 million light-years distant and almost 200,000 light years across.

The galaxy has an odd nickname. In December 1953, President Eisenhower gave a speech that was dubbed Atoms for Peace.

The theme was promoting nuclear power for peaceful purposes – a particularly hot topic at the time.
This speech and the associated conference made waves in the scientific community and beyond to such an extent that NGC 7252 was named the Atoms for Peace galaxy.

This nickname is quite ironic, as the galaxy’s past was anything but peaceful.

Its peculiar appearance is the result of a collision between two similar gas-rich disc galaxies that took place about 600 million years ago, which ripped both galaxies apart.

The loop-like outer structures, likely made up of dust and stars flung outwards by the crash, but recalling orbiting electrons in an atom, are partly responsible for the galaxy’s nickname.

Read More Here

Exploding meteor spotted in the night sky over the Lower Mainland and Western Washington.

The Province

Exploding meteor: Bright bolide lights up Friday night sky from Chilliwack to Nanaimo to Seattle

 

By PATRICK JOHNSTON, The Province December 5, 2015

 

A bolide, or exploding meteor, similar to this one was spotted in the night sky over the Lower Mainland and Western Washington on Friday night.

Photograph by: NASA , The Province

Tina Robertson was just trying to catch a stray cat out in front of her property when she heard it.
“It freaked me right out,” she said.

Then she looked up to see a “big ball of fire.”

“It was moving like hell,” she said. “It was big, but not as big as that one in Russia.”

What she and other witnesses as far afield as Seattle and Nanaimo seem to have seen around 6:50 p.m. Friday was a type of meteor known as a bolide. Bolides are as bright as a full moon; they’re a meteor that doesn’t just burn up as it travels through the atmosphere, it explodes.

(Hat tip to Seattle Twitter user Reb Roush for pointing us all to the term.)

Robertson’s partner Wilf Krickhan was loading up firewood in a bobcat behind the house when he saw the blue-green bolide flash across the sky.

Read More Here

An international team of astrophysicists has for the first time witnessed a star being swallowed by a black hole and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light.

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Your source for the latest research news

 

Scientists get first glimpse of black hole eating star, ejecting high-speed flare

Date:

November 27, 2015

Source:

Johns Hopkins University

Summary:

An international team of astrophysicists has for the first time witnessed a star being swallowed by a black hole and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light.

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This artists impression shows a black hole consuming a star that has been torn apart by the black hole's strong gravity. As a result of this massive "meal" the black hole begins to launch a powerful jet that we can detect with radio telescopes.

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Swift

 

 

An international team of astrophysicists led by a Johns Hopkins University scientist has for the first time witnessed a star being swallowed by a black hole and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light.

The finding reported in the journal Science tracks the star -- about the size of our sun -- as it shifts from its customary path, slips into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole and is sucked in, said Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins.

"These events are extremely rare," van Velzen said. "It's the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months."

Black holes are areas of space so dense that irresistible gravitational force stops the escape of matter, gas and even light, rendering them invisible and creating the effect of a void in the fabric of space. Astrophysicists had predicted that when a black hole is force-fed a large amount of gas, in this case a whole star, then a fast-moving jet of plasma -- elementary particles in a magnetic field -- can escape from near the black hole rim, or "event horizon." This study suggests this prediction was correct, the scientists said.

"Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game," said van Velzen, who led the analysis and coordinated the efforts of 13 other scientists in the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Australia.

Supermassive black holes, the largest of black holes, are believed to exist at the center of most massive galaxies. This particular one lies at the lighter end of the supermassive black hole spectrum, at only about a million times the mass of our sun, but still packing the force to gobble a star.
The first observation of the star being destroyed was made by a team at the Ohio State University, using an optical telescope in Hawaii. That team announced its discovery on Twitter in early December 2014.

After reading about the event, van Velzen contacted an astrophysics team led by Rob Fender at the University of Oxford in Great Britain. That group used radio telescopes to follow up as fast as possible. They were just in time to catch the action.

By the time it was done, the international team had data from satellites and ground-based telescopes that gathered X-ray, radio and optical signals, providing a stunning "multi-wavelength" portrait of this event.

It helped that the galaxy in question is closer to Earth than those studied previously in hopes of tracking a jet emerging after the destruction of a star. This galaxy is about 300 million light years away, while the others were at least three times farther away. One light year is 5.88 trillion miles.
The first step for the international team was to rule out the possibility that the light was from a pre-existing expansive swirling mass called an "accretion disk" that forms when a black hole is sucking in matter from space. That helped to confirm that the sudden increase of light from the galaxy was due to a newly trapped star.

"The destruction of a star by a black hole is beautifully complicated, and far from understood," van Velzen said. "From our observations, we learn the streams of stellar debris can organize and make a jet rather quickly, which is valuable input for constructing a complete theory of these events."
Van Velzen last year completed his doctoral dissertation at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where he studied jets from supermassive black holes. In the last line of the dissertation, he expressed his hope to discover these events within four years. It turned out to take only a few months after the ceremony for his dissertation defense.

Van Velzen and his team were not the only ones to hunt for radio signals from this particular unlucky star. A group at Harvard observed the same source with radio telescopes in New Mexico and announced its results online. Both teams presented results at a workshop in Jerusalem in early November. It was the first time the two competing teams had met face to face.

"The meeting was an intense, yet very productive exchange of ideas about this source," van Velzen said. "We still get along very well; I actually went for a long hike near the Dead Sea with the leader of the competing group."

 

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Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Johns Hopkins University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:
S. van Velzen, G. E. Anderson, N. C. Stone, M. Fraser, T. Wevers, B. D. Metzger, P. G. Jonker, A. J. van der Horst, T. D. Staley, A. J. Mendez, J. C. A. Miller-Jones, S. T. Hodgkin, H. C. Campbell, R. P. Fender. A radio jet from the optical and X-ray bright stellar tidal disruption flare ASASSN-14li. Science, 2015; DOI: 10.1126/science.aad1182

In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended. ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, study finds.

GLOBAL WARMING? NASA says Antarctic has been COOLING for past SIX years

ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, according to US space agency NASA.

 

By Jon Austin

 

PUBLISHED: 07:51, Sat, Nov 28, 2015 | UPDATED: 12:58, Sat, Nov 28, 2015

 

 

NASA

Heimdal Glacier southern Greenland, from NASA's Falcon 20 aircraft at 33,000 feet above sea level.

An intensive scientific study of both Earth's poles has found that from 2009 to 2016 overall temperature has dropped in the southern polar region.NASA’s Operation IceBridge is an airborne survey of polar ice and has finalised two overlapping research campaigns at both the poles.In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended.Coupled with the latest announcement of slight cooling in the area, it has fuelled claims from climate change deniers that human industrialisation is not having the huge impact on global tenperature as often is claimed.

 

 

 

NASA

Map showing the extent of ice during the NASA studies

Read More Here


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Examiner.com

New paper claims no pause in warming, but unaltered data says otherwise

Thomas Richard

Boston Environmental Policy Examiner

 

November 25, 2015 9:20 AM MST

Photo by Aaron Harris

Environmental activists have plundered Nature's Scientific Reports and released a paper yesterday that they claim removes all doubt there is a global warming pause. After examining 40 peer-reviewed papers that show a global warming hiatus, they claim the papers didn't examine a long enough period of time. In fact, the authors—Stephan Lewandowsky, James Risbey, and Naomi Oreskes—broke the golden rule of science: they started with a predetermined outcome and then cherry-picked the data to fit their conclusion. It also runs counter to the unaltered datasets from leading climate institutions.
The paper assessed the "magnitude and significance of all possible trends up to 25 years duration looking backwards from each year over the past 30 years." Unsurprisingly, the authors thought the papers didn't use a long enough time frame to show a clear global warming pause over the entire global warming "record." Here we document how this extended global warming record has been tampered, altered, and utilized for politicized "green ideology," and how massive alterations were made to both NASA and NOAA's temperature data series.

According to the satellite record (the most accurate), weather balloons, radiosonde data, sea surface temperatures, and weather stations (least accurate), previously unadulterated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA GISS) data showed a long-term definitive trend: no increase in tropospheric temperatures when the Industrial Revolution began in earnest after World War II.

We do have weather station temperature data, albeit spotty, that goes back to 1881 and it shows regular intervals of warming and cooling, and not the popular upward slope in temperatures used by environmentalists and governments to illustrate dramatic global warming. More on that shortly.

Read More Here



Next: How NOAA rewrote climate data to hide global warming pause

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Nasa Earth Observatory

Earth is Cooling…No It’s Warming

In 1967 Hansen went to work for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, where he continued his research on planetary problems. Around 1970, some scientists suspected Earth was entering a period of global cooling. Decades prior, the brilliant Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch had explained how our world warms and cools on roughly 100,000-year cycles due to its slowly changing position relative to the Sun. Milankovitch’s theory suggested Earth should be just beginning to head into its next ice age cycle. The surface temperature data gathered by Mitchell seemed to agree; the record showed that Earth experienced a period of cooling (by about 0.3°C) from 1940 through 1970. Of course, Mitchell was only collecting data over a fraction of the Northern Hemisphere—from 20 to 90 degrees North latitude. Still, the result drew public attention and a number of speculative articles about Earth’s coming ice age appeared in newspapers and magazines.

Initial efforts to observe Earth’s temperature were limited to the Northern Hemisphere, and they showed a cooling trend from 1940 to 1970 (jagged line). Scientists estimated the relative effects of carbon dioxide (warming, top curve) and aerosols (cooling, bottom curve) on climate, but did not have enough data to make precise predictions. (Graph from Mitchell, 1972.)

But other scientists forecasted global warming. Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko had also observed the three-decade cooling trend. Nevertheless, he published a paper in 1967 in which he predicted the cooling would soon switch to warming due to rising human emissions of carbon dioxide. Budyko’s paper and another paper published in 1975 by Veerabhadran Ramanathan caught Hansen’s attention. Ramanathan pointed out that human-made chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) are particularly potent greenhouse gases, with as much as 200 times the heat-retaining capacity of carbon dioxide. Because people were adding CFCs to the lower atmosphere at an increasing rate, Ramanathan expressed concern that these new gases would eventually add to Earth’s greenhouse effect and cause our world to warm. (Because CFCs also erode Earth’s protective ozone layer, their use was mostly abolished in 1989 with the signing of the Montreal Protocol.)

Read More Here

 

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Climate change: How do we know?

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO₂ has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.)

 

The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.¹
 
Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.

Read More Here

 

The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:

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  Republic of Maldives: Vulnerable to sea level rise

  Photograph by Shahee Ilyas  
  

  Malé, capital of Maldives  Wikipedia.org

  Sea level rise

  Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.⁴

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  Global temperature rise

  All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880.⁵ Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.⁶ Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.⁷

   

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  Warming oceans

  The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.⁸

   

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  Flowing meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet

  Shrinking ice sheets

  The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

  
  

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News release reports , Earth's magnetic field is not about to flip. Disputing reports of over 1 year ago stating the contrary

 

Earth's Magnetic Field is Not About to Flip, Like Previously Thought

Catherine Griffin

First Posted: Nov 24, 2015 11:09 AM EST

 

(Photo : Huapei Wang, with source files courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory/NOAA/DOD)

 

Earth's magnetic field is not about to flip. While the intensity of this field has weakened in the last couple hundred of years, researchers have found that this doesn't mean it's about to reverse.

 

Humans have lived through dips in magnetic field intensity before. However, there are debates about whether reversals of the magnetic field in the distant past had any connection to species extinctions. Today, a magnetic field reversal would have a huge impact due to one very important thing: technology. The magnetic field deflects the solar wind and cosmic rays. This means that with a weaker field, more radiation gets through which can disrupt power grids and satellite communications.
 
"The field may be decreasing rapidly, but we're not yet down to the long-term average," said Dennis Kent, one of the researchers, in a news release. "In 100 years, the field may even go back the other direction [in intensity]."

Read More Here

 

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Earth's Magnetic Field Flip Could Happen Sooner Than Expected

Changes measured by the Swarm satellite show that our magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than originally predicted, especially over the Western Hemisphere

 

 

By Kelly Dickerson and LiveScience | July 9, 2014

 

Changes measured by the Swarm satellite over the past 6 months shows that Earth's magnetic field is changing. Shades of red show areas where it is strengthening, and shades of blue show areas that are weakening.
Credit: ESA/DTU

Earth's magnetic field, which protects the planet from huge blasts of deadly solar radiation, has been weakening over the past six months, according to data collected by a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite array called Swarm.

 

The biggest weak spots in the magnetic field — which extends 370,000 miles (600,000 kilometers) above the planet's surface — have sprung up over the Western Hemisphere, while the field has strengthened over areas like the southern Indian Ocean, according to the magnetometers onboard the Swarm satellites — three separate satellites floating in tandem.

The scientists who conducted the study are still unsure why the magnetic field is weakening, but one likely reason is that Earth's magnetic poles are getting ready to flip, said Rune Floberghagen, the ESA's Swarm mission manager. In fact, the data suggest magnetic north is moving toward Siberia.
"Such a flip is not instantaneous, but would take many hundred if not a few thousand years," Floberghagen told Live Science. "They have happened many times in the past."[50 Amazing Facts About Planet Earth]

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Mars is destined to get a spectacular new planetary ring system to rival that of Saturn, in about 30 million years or so, according to scientists.

ABC.net.au

 

Mars to get planetary ring set to rival Saturn, with moon Phobos set to break up from tidal stress

ABC Science

By Stuart Gary

Updated Mon at 2:50pm

Photo: A computer generated image of the rim of the red planet Mars. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

 

Mars is destined to get a spectacular new planetary ring system to rival that of Saturn, but don't hold your breath because it will not be for another 30 million years or so, according to scientists.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, are based on a new study to determine the fate destined to befall the diminutive Martian moon Phobos.

Over time Phobos is creeping inwards towards Mars at a couple of centimetres per year.

Dr Benjamin Black

"We found that Phobos is too weak to withstand tidal stresses from Mars and we expect it to break apart in a few tens of millions of years and form a ring around Mars," the study's lead author Dr Benjamin Black of the University of California said.

Only the giant planets of the outer solar system have rings at the moment.
Phobos — the larger of the two moons circling Mars — orbits just 6,000 kilometres above the surface of the red planet, closer than any other moon in the solar system.

"Over time Phobos is creeping inwards towards Mars at a couple of centimetres per year," Dr Black said.

"We wanted to figure out whether Phobos crashes into Mars or breaks apart to form a ring, so we needed to know how strong it was — is it going to be able to stand the increasing tidal stresses that are going to be pulling this little moon apart, or will it eventually succumb to these forces?"
Dr Black and co-author Tushar Mittal found that Phobos will be pulled apart by the red planet's gravitational tidal forces in about 20 to 40 million years' time.

"We concluded that Phobos would break apart between 2.4 and about 1.1 Mars radii, somewhere between 8,500 kilometres down to around 4,000 kilometres or so," Dr Black said.



Read More Here

Earth Approaching Objects : November 18th, 2015

 

All Sky Fireball Network

 

by Dr. Tony Phillips.


Every night, a network of NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.

On Nov. 17, 2015, the network reported 38 fireballs.
(23 sporadics, 9 Northern Taurids, 3 Leonids, 2 November I Draconids, 1 omicron Eridanid)

In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]

Near Earth Asteroids

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.

On November 18, 2015 there were 1634 potentially hazardous asteroids.

Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:

Asteroid	Date(UT)	Miss Distance	Size
2015 VR64	Nov 12	3 LD	14 m
2015 VV105	Nov 13	9 LD	10 m
2015 VU65	Nov 14	5.2 LD	23 m
2015 VY105	Nov 15	0.09 LD	7 m
2015 VN105	Nov 16	5.5 LD	13 m
2015 VD105	Nov 16	7.2 LD	52 m
2015 VC106	Nov 18	7 LD	24 m
2005 UL5	Nov 20	5.9 LD	390 m
2015 VE66	Nov 21	7.5 LD	64 m
2015 VO142	Nov 24	1 LD	7 m
2015 VH2	Nov 24	12.9 LD	14 m
2003 EB50	Nov 29	48.8 LD	2.2 km
2007 BG29	Dec 1	54.1 LD	1.1 km
2015 VZ145	Dec 8	9.2 LD	81 m
1998 WT24	Dec 11	10.9 LD	1.1 km
2011 YD29	Dec 24	9.7 LD	24 m
2003 SD220	Dec 24	28.4 LD	1.8 km
2008 CM	Dec 29	22.8 LD	1.5 km
2004 MQ1	Jan 2	55.4 LD	1.1 km
1999 JV6	Jan 6	12.6 LD	410 m

Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach.

Part of Pluto's Heart Was 'Born Yesterday'

SPACE.com

 

by Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor   |   November 11, 2015 07:56am ET

By counting craters across Pluto, scientists determined that some regions of the dwarf planet are as young as 10 million years old while others are nearly as old as the 4.5-billion-year-old solar system. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Pluto has a surprisingly youthful heart — the smooth, round region on the dwarf planet'ssurface is no more than 10 million years old, a blink of an eye in the 4.5-billion-year lifetime of the solar system.

The large,western lobe of the "heart" on Pluto's surface is also known as Sputnik Planum, and it is strikingly free of craters. Thissuggeststhat geologic processes recentlysmoothedthe region over. Researchers with NASA's New Horizons mission said this is surprising, because such processes require an internal heat source, which is often lost in small bodies like Pluto.

"It's a huge finding that small planets can be active on a massive scale, billions of years after their creation," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Colorado, said on Monday (Nov. 9) at the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in National Harbor, Maryland. [See more amazing Pluto photos from New Horizons]

The New Horizons team announced several major findings at the meeting. Besides age estimates for other regions of Pluto, the scientists announced new information about the dwarf planet's hazy, surprisingly small atmosphere; the discovery of what may be ice volcanoes on Pluto's surface; and evidence that Pluto's four smallest moons are spinning around the dwarf planet in "pandemonium."

Read More Here

Pluto continues to deliver surprises. Spinning moons, possible ice volcanoes detected on dwarf planet

Science News

News

Planetary Science,

Mission to Pluto

By

Christopher Crockett

5:54pm, November 9, 2015

OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD LANDSCAPE The latest data from the New Horizons mission has helped create topographical maps of Pluto (blue shows lower elevations, brown, higher elevations) that have revealed surprises such as these two possible ice volcanoes, the first of their kind in the outer solar system.

SwRI, JHUAPL, NASA

OXON HILL, Md. — At this point, the only thing unsurprising about Pluto is that it continues to offer up surprises.

A wide variety of landscapes, ongoing surface transformations and a family of wildly spinning moons are among the riddles reported by the New Horizons mission team November 9 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences.

“Pluto is like a graduate course in planetary science,” mission leader Alan Stern said at a news briefing. “It’s going to take the larger planetary science community many years to digest all this.”

The New Horizons spacecraft, which buzzed the dwarf planet on July 14, has so far sent back only about 20 percent of the data it acquired from the Pluto system. And every new nugget continues a story that’s pretty familiar by now: Pluto is a weird place.

Terrains both new and old sit side-by-side on Pluto’s surface. Some heavily cratered regions are roughly 4 billion years old, about as old as Pluto itself. Others, like the now famous heart, appear to have been laid down within the last 10 million years, judging by the total lack of craters.

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Fireballs are falling to Earth tonight in numbers we won't see for another 10 years

msn

 

here's how to watch

Business Insider

jorwig@businesssinsider.com (Jessica Orwig) 

Keep your eyes peeled tonight for some spectacular fireballs lighting up the sky.


 © 

Provided by Business Insider KHONTHAI Channel on Youtube 

 
Fireballs are extremely bright meteors, and right now Earth is in the midst of the Tuarid meteor shower, which is peaking on the night of Wednesday, Nov. 11.
"The best time to view the Taurids is from midnight to 3 am local time," NASA wrote in a Reddit AMA. "There should be a handful per hour. Taurid rates are not high, but the ones you will see will be very bright."

The peak of the shower — when we can see the most meteors per hour — is expected to have between seven to 10 meteors per hour, and some of those are almost certain to be a fireball. The best way to watch any meteor shower is to get far away from city lights and look up, no special equipment required.

However, fireballs are bright enough to be seen even amidst city lights, so if you can't get far away from the city, there's still a chance you might spot one, or more.

Look to Taurus

Meteor showers usually happen when Earth passes through a comet's stream of residual dust and debris in space.

 

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 The debris collides with our planet, is pulled toward Earth's center by gravity, and burns up in the atmosphere, producing bright streaks in the night sky that we sometimes refer to as falling stars.
Compared to other meteor showers, the Taurid meteors are relatively sluggish, colliding with Earth at speeds of about 65,000 mph — less than half the speed of the rapid Perseid meteors, which move at about 133,000 mph.

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