TGT #25 - The Meteor Drizzle, But That’s Okay!; + 6 more [June 1, 2022]
This Just In--A Meteor Drizzle, But That's Okay!, Betelgeuse's Weather Was Cool, Wet, Cloudy, and Dimmed, Dating the Late Bombardment; The Grand Line-Up Details; Astro Trucks and Actresses
Cover Photo - No Storm, Just a Shower
In This Issue:
Cover Photo — No Storm, Just a Shower
Welcome to Issue 25
This Just In —
* The Meteor Drizzle, But That’s Okay! (Cover Story)
* And the Weather on Betelgeuse Was Cooler with Clouds….
* The Silver Link to the Early Solar System’s Late BombardmentSky Planning Calendar —
* Moon-Gazing - Moon Glides Past Evening First Magnitude Stars
* Observing—Plan-et —
- Venus, Uranus, Sun, Saturn* For The Future
- The Grand Line-Up in the Dawn!
* Border Crossings
Astronomy in Everyday Life -
Random ObservationsThe Classroom Astronomer Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #27 June 1, 2022 Issue Highlights.
Welcome to The Galactic Times Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #25 !
The sky can be very predictable. Humans, not so much. Too much hype. Too much extremism. Too little “let’s just see what happens first.” Predictions for thunderstorms when all it does is rain, just to be sure we don’t get sued for not predicting storms. Predictions for meteor storms when simply saying we’re going to see the results of an outburst from 27 years ago, and there is a slight chance of a bigger storm; no, we have to hype the big storm instead. Guess what we got?
I predict you’ll probably like this issue. Coverage of SW3, some news not making big headlines but interesting nevertheless, and all you need to enjoy the Grand Line-Up, without the hype. And two small fun items of astronomy found in everyday life. Enjoy.
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Publisher — Dr. Larry Krumenaker Email: newsletter@thegalactictimes.com
This Just In—
* The Meteor Drizzle, But That’s Okay!
Last night, as I write this, we were ‘supposed’ to be treated to a rare meteor storm, due to the Earth crossing the stream of meteoroid debris from Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3/73P. Mainstream media and some astronomical ones were advising all to watch the skies for a brief display of upwards of 100 per hour, perhaps more! Centered around 12 midnight Central Daylight Time May 30/31st, this spectacle would be the product of the destruction of this comet, discovered in 1930, and having had two outbursts and fragmentations in 1995 and 2006, the latter resulting in dozens of fragments, some of which became briefly naked eye bright—5th magnitude—as I and my then-college astronomy class can attest. What we were to see were debris mostly from the 1995 outburst.
I myself spent an hour around the predicted peak ensconced in a deck chair watching a zone of sky between trees in a beautifully clear and surprisingly dark sky. I estimate I could see about 1/8th to 1/3rd of the dome above me, from Arcturus to Libra and the head of Scorpius, up to Vega and Hercules. I could easily see 5th magnitude stars despite some local, though mostly blocked, light pollution sources.
I saw….5….meteors coming from Bootes during my 55 minutes before some cirrus interfered, plus two sporadics. The ill-named Tau Herculids were short, faint, mostly 4th magnitude though some were 2nd or even 1st, and quite slow. As Arcturus was high, no worse than 45 degrees altitude by the end of the hour, this makes the ZHR, the zenithal hourly rate, of at least 15 to 25 meteors per hour. Certainly no storm, but a respectable minor/borderline major shower if it were to be seen every year. Many other showers that repeat annually are this rate. April’s Lyrids. The upcoming Delta Aquarids in July. The famous Leonids, also known for rare storms. But this was still cool. I was witnessing the in-falling debris of a cometary outburst that happened in my lifetime, not some debris over a comet’s orbit long-spread-out over millennia!
Wouldn’t it have been a better thing for the spin-masters to have pointed out that we were about to see the explosive debris of the outburst, like you might have seen from a small earthly explosion, in some small time delay, rather than a hyped-up potential storm?
* And the Weather on Betelgeuse Was Cooler with Clouds….
Back in 2019-20 the red giant Betelgeuse noticeably dimmed, distorting the image of the Orion constellation and causing considerable excitement that the star might be about to go supernova. It didn’t…and the cause of the dimming became a high source of interest and research. Was the star itself fading in brightness? Was the surface of the star being blocked by dust clouds? How about star spots covering large portions of the star’s surface? Betelgeuse is one of the few stars that ARE large enough that we can, with interferometry, actually image its surface, though poorly. Yet with all the ground and space-based observatories, controversy still exists as to the cause of the star’s dimming and recovery.
Enter data from a very unexpected source—a Japanese geosynchronous weather satellite, Himawari-8. An Earth-facing weather satellite?? Himawari happens to observe our planet in optical and infrared, perfect for monitoring red giant stars and dust clouds around them, and such stars, including Betelgeuse, happen to be imaged around the Earth’s edge in its camera’s field of view. Plus, being outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, the satellite never worries about extinction of light or having to observe only in ‘windows’ where light is not absorbed by our atmosphere’s molecules, or downtime from solar glare like Earth observatories. And it can do so all year long.
The satellite made observations every 1.72 days in 16 optical and infrared light bands over four years and the plot of the light curves indicated that there was a cooling of 140 degrees Kelvin, but that accounted for only half the 1.2 magnitudes of dimming in V (visual) magnitude range). The other half has to be caused by extinction due to some kind of obstruction. Or some other cause. In testing some of the hypotheses, the mid-infrared light curves narrow the cause indeed to an increase in circumstellar dust. How so?
One of the Himawari’s research goals is to study atmospheric water from above so it is very sensitive to water molecule spectral lines. From Earth’s surface that would hide stellar spectra’s water lines; from orbit, Betelgeuse’s are free of interference. Sometime around April 2019 a clump of H2O gas in Betelgeuse’s photosphere burst. The hypothesis is that a shock wave at the bottom of the photosphere propagated upwards and send up a clumpy cloud of water molecules, along with a cloud of dust material, causing both a cooling and an obscuration of the star’s surface. A cloud with rain on a star! (Nature Astronomy, May 30, 2022, D. Taniguchi, K. Yamazaki and S. Uno.)
* The Silver Link to the Early Solar System’s Late Bombardment
It is a known fact—the early solar system was a violent place to be. The inner planets are blanketed with craters and meteoroids still pepper the worlds. But the exact tale they tell is still locked inside them. Exactly when did the early hard objects in the solar system form? Where did they form? And how did they end up creating this interplanetary war zone out of gas and tiny bits of dust?
A global group of scientists analyzed meteorites for the amounts of Palladium (Pd) and its decay product Silver (Ag), which has a half-life of about 6.5 million years (My). It is also isotope dependent, in turn dependent upon the cooling temperature of its environment, which gives a clue to the conditions of the early solar nebula.
After correcting for galactic cosmic rays, something the scientists claim had not been previously accounted for, their work indicates that the parent bodies, the asteroids that became the meteorites we call carbonaceous (CC) and non-carbonaceous (NC) iron meteoroids, began to form about 3 My after the Sun and the protoplanetary nebula. The NC parents formed with molten cores closer to the Sun than Jupiter, while the CC parents were beyond it. After some time between 7.8 and 11.7 My, impacts on or between these parents occurred at least partly because the protoplanetary gas nebula had cooled and dissipated, removing a cushioning effect that protected them, and allowing the impacts to expose the parent body cores. The gas had not allowed much eccentricities in orbiting bodies, thereby not allowing much violent collisional dynamics. This is consistent with images of other nebulae’s protoplanetary disks which seem to last about 6-8 My. After the 12th My, Jupiter and Saturn’s gravities, and their inward and outward migrations, would have increased the activity, leading to the Bombardment we all know. (Nature Astronomy, May 2022, A. Hunt et al).
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.
Our evenings are planet-free, though just barely, so no Moon passages by planets this fortnight, just simply Moon and stars.
June 1 The dwarf planet/asteroid/minor planet Ceres gets covered up (occulted) by the Moon tonight. Visible over the USA, Hawaii, S. Canada and North Mexico, nevertheless this is a tough one. Ceres is 8th magnitude, in Taurus, deep into evening twilight.
Also today, the Moon is also at Apogee, its farthest point of its orbit to us. A micro-crescent.
June 2 Find the Moon close by and below the star Pollux this evening.
June 5 Find the Moon to the upper right of the star Regulus.
June 7 First Quarter.
June 9 The star lower left of the Moon is Spica.
June 11 A more challenging star to find, and pronounce, near and to the right of the Moon tonight is Zubenelgenubi, the Alpha star of Libra the Scales, and formerly one of Scorpius’ claws endpoints.
June 13 The Moon is near and right of bright red giant Antares in Scorpius.
June 14 It is the night of the Full Moon, and Perigee, too. A (aaaargh!) Super-Moon (like that means anything….).
Observing---Plan-et….
Saturn does rise at midnight at the first day of the month—if your jurisdiction doesn’t acknowledge daylight savings time. But those on DST have to wait until the 15th for that claim.
On the other hand, the dawn sky is in active mode for the real planetary show— a grand lining up of naked-eye Wandering Stars. See the For the Future section below.
Venus passes 1.6-degrees south of Uranus—from mid-northern latitudes, directly below it)—on the 11th-12th.
The Sun has its earliest sunrise, on the 14th, even though it isn’t the solstice day.
On the 15th, Saturn rises at midnight Daylight Savings Time, becoming an evening planet for everybody, and ending our evening planet drought (not counting Mercury’s temporary visit a few weeks ago). On the 16th, Mercury, having spurned the evening, in fact is at its greatest elongation west, its maximum distance from the Sun in the dawn sky. Which leads us to…..
For The Future
The Grand Line-Up for the year, beginning now, will more prominent in the second half of June, and peak in the period June 23-25, when the five bright naked-eye planets will be strung out in a line in their natural order from the Sun. Closest to the Sun is Mercury and farthest is Saturn and that is how they will be displayed in the early morning, beginning roughly June 4th, and ending ~July 10th. That peak date, the 24th, is when the Moon stands in for the Earth, between Venus and Mars, in the 100-degree or so parade of planets. Once Mercury departs, the remaining worlds will keep the line-up going for about another month, until Saturn reaches opposition in mid-August and sets at (and later, before) sunrise.
An article in more detail on this, and Earthly planetary line-ups, i.e. Model Solar Systems on the landscape, and what to do with them educationally, can be found in the current issue, #27, of The Classroom Astronomer Inbox Magazine. A much earlier article can be found in the original Classroom Astronomer Magazine #11, from 2011, in the Hermograph Store.
Border Crossings
There are none. The Sun spends this fortnight in Taurus. Traditionally it is in Gemini. So much for tradition.
Astronomy in Everyday Life
Random Observations
It has been noted that prices are rising in part because of shipping issues. I hope this was named because of its speed and not because it was crash and burning too much merchandise….
A new (and, I found, personally enjoyable) series on Disney+ is Obi-Wan Kenobi, a pre-quel to the Star Wars franchise. One of its stars is a small child actress playing a young Leia. Her name is Vivien Lyra Blair, only nine but with a ton of acting credits already. I would LOVE to know how she got the name of a summer constellation into her name! I can’t say I’ve ever met a person with a constellation name in their name, other than Leo’s and Hercules’, though I’ve met some with star names. One named Shaula comes to mind, and Harry Potter is filled with astronomical name references for people, but they aren’t real though I suspect there are some Sirius’s and Rigels and maybe some Andromedas and Bellatrix’s now because of that!
The Classroom Astronomer Newsletter-Inbox Magazine #27 June 1, 2022 Issue Highlights.
Cover Photo - Planets Line Up in the Dawn
Welcome to Issue 27!
Editorial - The Real Lesson to Learn from Comet SW3 and the Meteor ‘Storm’
Sky Lessons- Planets All in a Row, in the Sky
Connections to the Sky - Planets All in a Row, on Earth (Model Solar Systems)
Astronomical Teachniques - Planets All in A Row, Educational Activities.
The Galactic Times #25 Inbox Magazine Highlights
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