#24E - Mars Influences the Earth (Not Astrologically!) [A TGT InDepth Story] - A Night for Seeing a Comet - & 4 More Stories
TGT 3/16/24: How Planets Influence the Earth's Climate (not news...); Finding Comet Pons-Brooke the Easy Way; Mercury Has Its Moment Out of the Sunlight; Penumbral Eclipse. Surviving a Lunar Eclipse.
Cover Photo - Three Objects That Affect Earth—Moon, Mars, Venus
In This Issue:
Cover Photo — Three Objects That Affect Earth—Moon, Mars, Venus
Welcome to Issue 24E!
Sky Planning Calendar —
* Moon-Gazing - A Penumbral Eclipse
* Observing—Plan-et - Mercury has its Moment; Comet in the Evening Twilight
* Border Crossings - Five Days of Fishiness* For the Future - Solar Eclipse Information, TCA and AAS
Deeper Looks
- Mars Affects Earth’s Weather and Oceans…and That’s Not News (Cover Story)Astronomy in Everyday Life - In honor of the Lunar Eclipse this month….
Welcome to The Galactic Times Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #24E!
The Moon gets to Apogee, the farthest part of its orbit around Earth, and therefore fails to get into the deeper part of Earth’s Shadow on the 25th; it goes only deep into the outer shadow, the penumbra. But for North Americans watching near or after midnight, it is the eclipse of the month.
Meanwhile, Jupiter is mostly the planet show of the evening, but Mercury steals some of its thunder and has its best evening appearance of the year. In fact, for a few nights, if your horizon is low enough, you can see it setting in dark, non-twilit skies.
Comet Pons-Brooke is naked eye but dim and in twilight, but for one evening, it is easy to find, near the 2nd-magnitude star Hamal, in Aries, and halfway up (and to the right) between Jupiter and Mercury.
But our Cover Story was one that hit the Big Time, CNN. There Mars was headlined as influencing Earth’s climate and oceans. But the researchers didn’t do their due diligence. While Mars stirring up ocean currents may be news, the 2-million-year cyclicity they touted, wasn’t. Yours truly was there when it was news, 30 years ago.
Enjoy!
Publisher — Dr. Larry Krumenaker Email: newsletter@thegalactictimes.com
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Sky Planning Calendar
Moon-Gazing
Moon passages by a star, planet or deep sky object are a good way to find a planet or other object if you’ve never located it before.
Use these events to learn to measure the sky with lunar diameters.
One diameter equals 0.5-degrees, on average.
March 16 First Quarter Moon, around midnight between the 16th and 17th.
March 19 The eastern Gemini Twin star, Pollux, is passed by the Moon by three lunar diameters.
March 21 The Moon passes by Regulus, the Heart of the Lion, Leo.
March 23 The Moon reaches Apogee, the farthest it gets from the Earth this month. Can you tell that the Moon phases are a bit smaller than usual? Hah…
March 25 Full Moon, and a penumbral eclipse in the pre-dawn hours. See below. The star below or left of the eclipsed Moon is blue-white Spica in Virgo….
March 26 Spica then gets passed by the Moon, in the afternoon, though in the US, by about three lunar diameters. You’ll see it farther away as it rises in the ESE, but to the Moon’s right now.
March 30 The waning Moon passes the red giant star Antares by less than a lunar diameter in the morning skies.
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March 25th Penumbral Lunar Eclipse
The Sun causes the Earth’s shadow to be directly behind the planet just enough to cover the Moon with the Earth’s more transparent outer shadow, the penumbra. An almost partial eclipse, the Moon’s limb just misses the edge of the darker inner shadow, the umbra; the Moon is 98% of the way into the outer shadow, the penumbra, at eclipse max.
Technically the eclipse begins 11:53 PM on the 24th, CDT but nobody can see the penumbral edge, it is too diffuse and dim on the Moon. One might expect to to start to see a dusky shading on Luna’s leading edge perhaps 48 minutes before maximum eclipse, give or take, say 1:25 AM whereas the max coverage is at 2:13 AM CDT. That predicts a loss of shadow coverage viewing around 3:01 AM. Add or subtract one or more hours depending on whether you are in Eastern Time (+1) or more, or west of Central Time (Pacific Time = -2), for examples.
How close to those ‘starts’ and ‘ends’ can YOU do?
Are you earlier or later?
Viewing is best in the Americas, except eastern Brazil, and in the Pacific as far west as Japan and most of Australia. Europe? Only the western part—the UK, and west of a line from Norway to Germany. A smidge of west Africa, too.
Observing---Plan-et
==Fantastic Mercury, Nearly Last Call for Jupiter but a Comet can be Found==
Mercury is having its Northern Hemisphere (NH) moment. For the best appearance in NH evening twilight, on the 17th you’ll see it at greatest brightness, magnitude -0.9, almost as bright as the Dog Star, Sirius; a better description would be its greatest contrast in brightness with its competition, twilight—it was technically brighter up to two weeks ago but then it was deep in the twilight glare. Though fading a bit each night, it gets farther from the Sun’s disk until the 24th, when it is at a maximum distance of 19-degrees. [On the 24th and thereabouts you’ll find Mercury far to the lower right (and quite lower!) of Jupiter once it gets dark enough.] Not the farthest it could get but far enough so that with its brightness it can be fairly easily spotted. It also does its rare thing….setting after twilight ends during the 22nd to 28th of the month.
Venus reaches the no-see zone, rising 45 minutes before the Sun on the 22nd, and very slowly loses more minutes every day. It is hard to find with the unaided eye starting then.
Mars remains low, uninteresting, and dim in the morning twilight. [But not in the news, see Deeper Looks.]
Jupiter is the last planet ‘standing’ in the dark evening sky, more or less. It sets by month-end only 1.5 hours after twilight ends. At that time, and the week before, it acts as a distant marker to find two objects in the evening sky: 1) Mercury always far to its lower right. 2) Comet Pons-Brooke. See below.
Saturn achingly hard to find in the twilight of morning, but on the 21st it is about a half-degree (one lunar diameter) away from bright, if twilight hidden, Venus.
Comet Pons-Brooks
Technically, 5th magnitude for the comet would make it dimly visible to the unaided eye, but this being twilight time, you will need binoculars and when you do, you’ll see it very close to the 2nd magnitude star Hamal in Aries the Ram, to the right of Jupiter around 10-ish degrees and not quite as high above the horizon as Jupiter, on the 31st. It brightens in April but gets lower into the southern hemisphere stars where northern hemisphere observers can’t spot it, too. So use this March 31st opportunity while you can!
Border Crossings
The Sun is comfortably inside Pisces the Fishes, but the horologists say it is in Aries (Hamal’s constellation!) after the 20th. So the two groups agree for 5 whole days.
For the Future
We’ve already told you about our The Classroom Astronomer 31-page PDF free off the Substack home page for The Galactic Times. As we went to press with this issue, the American Astronomical Society announced its own compilation, of past and brand new articles, useful for the upcoming eclipse (and free):
“A new collection from the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society (BAAS) pulls together dozens of articles documenting events, experiences, and engagements associated with the upcoming 2024 eclipse and the earlier 2023 annular eclipse. “Celebrating the Wonder of Science in the Shadow” features articles addressing myriad topics, including: problems faced by small towns along the path, creative ways to safely engage the public in viewing the Sun, and narratives about how members of the public have contributed to science in the past and can do so again in the future. There is even a test for general relativity on the list of things that can get done during the eclipse.”
Deeper Look
Mars Effects Earth’s Weather and Oceans…and That’s Not News
On March 12th CNN published an article “Mars could be ‘driving whirlpools’ in the Earth’s deep oceans, new study finds,” based on research published in Nature Communications”. In the research, University of Sydney researchers, using hundreds of deep sea drilled cores, concluded that deep-sea currents weakened and strengthened over a 2.4 million year cycle. They didn’t expect to see this and that this was the first study to reveal the process.
It may be the first to show currents are affected, but hardly the first one to reveal climate cycles caused by the influence of Mars. Back in 1995 yours truly interviewed and wrote about the work of Dr. Paul Olsen of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York State. He, and others, had found the same cycle in cores drilled deep into New Jersey’s ancient and extinct Newark Basin.
How could Mars have such an effect on Earth? Two words: Gravity, Resonance. Add them together and you get what are called Milankovitch cycles.
First, all planets have gravity and those gravities pull on both bodies as they orbit the Sun. When the planets are closer together, they pull stronger. Basic middle school physics. But, second, the planets’ orbits are not circular; they are elliptical, with one end closer to the Sun than the opposite side of the orbit. That causes the gravitational effects on both planets to increase or decrease compared to the average pull. If these increased-over-average pulls happen on a regular time-table, you get repetition, i.e. resonance. A repeated pull on a regular basis can cause change in the orbit….or the planet--especially the tilts of either, or an increased ellipticity. Or some other effects.
There are a number of known resonance and gravitational effects on the Earth. Perhaps the most familiar is the wobbling of the Earth’s tilt. Like a spinning top, there is a desire of the spinning Earth to remain spinning in whatever orientation it is in. But the Moon in its close orbit to us does not orbit the Earth in the Earth’s equatorial plane. Therefore its gravity pulls not only on Earth in general (which includes creating tides but that’s another story), it wants to pull the Earth’s slightly fatter equatorial zone (larger by a few miles than the pole-Earth’s center-pole distance) down into the Moon’s orbital plane. The spinning top (Earth) resists and the physical compromise is that the Earth’s axis moves around in a cone shape in around 25,000 years. The practical effect of that wobble is we don’t always have a North Star, like Polaris. Another is the constellations of the zodiac shift their positions along the Ecliptic, the Sun’s apparent path in the sky over a year. That’s why the First Point of Aries, where Spring would begin, is now in Pisces. The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn on Earth were named thousands of years ago when the Sun’s northernmost and southernmost distances from the Equator were when the Sun was in the constellations of Cancer and Capricorn. Now those points are in Gemini and Sagittarius. (And one reason why the horoscope signs are no longer accurate, but that is also another story.)
The Earth’s orbit also is elliptical and thus it can be changed by gravitational pulls in a resonance situation. Its ellipticity and the direction the line between perihelion (closest point to the Sun) and aphelion (farthest) can be caused to change. Changing the first can make the Earth’s elliptical shape to get more, or less, elliptical over time. The latter can be made rotate around over 100,000 years. Even the tilt of the orbit can be changed to be greater or lesser than today.
While it is true that the closer one is to the Sun, the warmer the planet should get (just ask any comet as it swings around the Sun about temperature versus solar distance!), the change in distance because of being more or less eccentric--more or less elliptical—happens but it is small compared to any changes in tilt. The Earth’s tilt hasn’t always been 23.5 degrees; resonance effects with other solar system objects have changed that, too.
In all those cases, changes in orbital characteristics or tilts change our climate. The amount of sunlight during summer and winter changes. When eccentricity is high, winters becomes colder, more snow falls, and more sunlight reflected away, and the climate chills. It is one reason we have had periodic ice ages. And all those changes add or subtract from each other. But they don’t happen at random. They happen periodically, and like the concept of biorhythms, sometimes those periodicities add together and sometimes they cancel each other out. Regardless, if the climate changes, then effects of more moist or drier climates are seen in water and land and the life materials left in them.
First theorized by Scottish scientist-jack-of-all-trades James Croll in the mid-19th century, his idea got revamped by Serbian engineer/astronomer Milutin Milankovitch, in the 1920s. Noting that they now knew (but Croll didn’t) of a 41,000 year cycle in Earth’s orbital tilt, the adding and subtracting of that ‘obliquity’ variation’s effects on the polar regions (the equator handles any case with general nonchalance) changes when we have really had ice ages. For example, every fifth 21,000 years (the combination of changes in Earth’s axis precession with change partially reversed by the orbital precession) is cancelled by the 100,000 year orbital tilt change. The so-called 21k-cycle, the 41k-cycle and the 100k-cycle periods became known as Milankovitch cycles.
A century ago this was a celebrity-causing development. Researchers around Europe found layers of fossils separated by hard rock, denoting that life ebbed and flowed with climate. New Guinea cliffs have coral reef remains at different elevations suggesting the past few hundreds or thousands of years, sea levels had risen and fallen regularly. Knowing the time scales of these visible effects confirms the various cycles.
In the 1970s more cycles became determined because of better dating of rock and sediment layers using paleomagnetic dating and the ratios of Oxygen isotopes. The 21k was a pair of cycles—19k due to Mars’ influence and a 23K cycle from earth’s interactions with Venus and Jupiter. A 400k+ cycle was also due to Jupiter changing the orbit’s eccentricity, and cycles of one million, two million and 4 million years were due to the various planets. That two million year cycle is important to us….it is a change due to Mars, but actually a change to Mars’ orbit, caused by the Earth pulling on it! Which then feedbacks to Earth by having Mars’ gravitational influence back at us different than before.
Olsen and colleagues thirty years ago dug enough deep cores to end up with one three-mile-long 25-million-year record of climate change in this now-no-longer-existing lake. The 100k and 400k cycles effects records are prominent. And a cycle of 1.9-million years—close enough to be a match for the two-million-year-hypothesized resonance—was also seen clearly. The other long ones, at 1 and 4 million years, were dimly seen in the rock record.
According to the Australian scientists, the 2.4-million year cycle due to Mars changed the heating of the Earth. Warmer climates come from increased solar energy and cause more vigorous ocean currents. Colder? Less vigorous.
A 2.4-million year current cycle, and climate cycle, is little different statistically from the 1.9-2.0 million year cycle detected 30 years ago. Or it may be the latter modified periodically by the 400k cycle. Whatever it is, it is not something “new” but simply a new effect we can observe in the rock records. The cycle’s been seen before.
----Dr. Larry Krumenaker
(Parts of this summary are excerpted from the author’s articles in January 21, 1994’s Science and the New York Academy of Science’s The Sciences November 1995 journals.)
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Astronomy in Everyday Life
In honor of the Lunar Eclipse this month….
Just in case eclipses scare you or you are superstitious of bad luck viewing one, here are two products recently seen that might help you survive the experience:
Good luck….
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