Meteor Shower Now Showing

Online science curriculum is great. But outdoors science curriculum is even better.

Rush out tonight and see the annual August shooting star show before this year's event is over. This annual meteor shower is called the Perseids because they seem to come from the constellation Perseus.

The Perseids are fragments left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle in the vicinity of Earth's orbit...actually the vicinity of the part of this orbit that the Earth passes through every August.

You could say that the Earth runs into the shower. Much like when you or I run into the shower. You don't get wet just standing in the bathroom. You have to move to a certain place where there are drops of water in the air. The orbiting Earth runs into the Perseids in a roughly similar way.

I remember this science song lyric from my childhood....

"A shooting star is not a star, why does it shine so bright?
The friction as it falls through air, causes heat and light."

Last night sitting outside talking with my brother, I saw a terrific shooting star with a long lasting trail. And I wasn't even looking!

Pretty DAF FY

More info in this Yahoo article.

Oil on Mars?

Could there be oil on Mars? For some reason, I started wondering about this. It seems theoretically possible, albeit unlikely. [Albeit is our vocabulary flash card for the day.]

If there was life at one time on Mars, perhaps when it was a wetter planet, organisms could have lived, died and become buried in the same manner that precipitated oil formation on Earth.

At least that's my theory. Comments from folks with more knowledge in the geobiology of oil formation are most welcome.

One thing seems certain. It wouldn't be very economical to transport for use on Earth.

Big new particle accelerator doesn't

Vocabulary flash cards for today's curriculum:
a. Higgs particle/Higgs boson
b. Large Hadron Collider

The biggest and latest "atom smasher" is just giving those atoms a gentle squeeze. Like Mr. Whipple the shopkeeper squeezing the Charmin toilet paper in the old commercials.

That's right, the Large Hadron Collider, a huge, high-profile international project that spans the French/Swiss border for several miles in each direction is not working that well. It's by far the biggest and meanest particle accelerator ever and but doesn't. It doesn't accelerate the particles that much. That's right, some of the scads of magnets that are supposed to accelerate particles to amazing velocities aren't working that well so far. So the particles aren't going that fast (relatively speaking) and their collisions are kind of on the wimpy side. More like fender benders than collisions.

It's kind of like asking the Tin Man to chop trees without enough oil to swing his arms fast.

But don't worry, they will fix it. Notwithstanding the satirical prose above, the engineers, scientists and construction teams building the LHC are a dedicated and ingenious group that are sure to make everything right.

And when they do, perhaps they will find that elusive Higgs particle. The hypothetical but as-yet-undetected particle that bestows the property of mass on all subatomic particles have mass. And maybe they will get clues about the mysterious dark matter that is supposed to account for 25% of the universe's mass (~weight) but also has never been seen.

So while the accelerator isn't accelerating that much, at least the dark matter is still living up to its name by remaining dark for now.

Jupiter Just Saved Earth...

...or so some believe. But others disagree. That controversy is today's curriculum.

"Jupiter took a bullet for us last weekend.

"An object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into the giant planet’s colorful cloud tops sometime Sunday, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean. This was the second time in 15 years that this had happened. The whole world was watching when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year.

"That’s Jupiter doing its cosmic job, astronomers like to say. Better it than us. Part of what makes the Earth such a nice place to live, the story goes, is that Jupiter’s overbearing gravity acts as a gravitational shield deflecting incoming space junk, mainly comets, away from the inner solar system where it could do for us what an asteroid apparently did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Indeed, astronomers look for similar configurations — a giant outer planet with room for smaller planets in closer to the home stars — in other planetary systems as an indication of their hospitableness to life.

"Anthony Wesley, the Australian amateur astronomer who first noticed the mark on Jupiter and sounded the alarm on Sunday, paid homage to that notion when he told The Sydney Morning Herald, “If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us.”

"But is this warm and fuzzy image of the King of Planets as father-protector really true?"

THE OTHER SIDE

"Jupiter is just as much a menace as a savior, he said. The big planet throws a lot of comets out of the solar system, but it also throws them in." [Quotes are excerpts from New York Times 7/26/09 "Juipter: Our Cosmic Protector" by Dennis Overbye]

PERSONALLY, I think this is a mathematical question. Obviously Jupiter deflects some passing objects toward and some away from earth and the question is how many in each column? Someone (not me) could do a computer simulation of objects (comets, etc.) traveling inward from the outer solar system and how they are affected by Jupiter's gravity. That should give an informed answer. Or at least as informed as we can be based on our knowledge and assumptions about the overall distribution of masses and trajectories of outer solar system objects heading inward.

News: Hubble Telescope Swivels for Action...science curriculum

News: Science curriculum for learning fun du jour...

Well as soon as that alert Aussie Amateur Astronomer, Anthony Wesley, spotted the new scar on Jupiter from the impact of the comet that hit it, the Hubble Telescope orbiting around the Earth was given the order to drop what you are doing and look at Jupiter.

The scar is the black blob in the photo on the post below. Almost looks like a scab forming on a cut.

Big News: Comet Hits Jupiter

Amazing news. By Jove! It's true. Last Sunday an amateur astronomer in Australia noticed a new "scar" on Jupiter and alerted the world. Evidently a comet hit Jupiter. This scar is the size of the Pacific Ocean.

Geez, and I thought the planets just rotated around the Sun and all the exciting events were millions of years in the past or millions of years in the future. Watching huge objects smash into each other right now in front of our eyes make learning fun.

Your vocabulary flash cards for today: Comet, Asteroid and Meteor. What's the difference? Look it up.

Moon Splits from Earth!

Where does the Moon come from? The leading hypothesis is the "Giant Impact Hypothesis" also known as the Big Splash or Big Whack (...with homage--vocabulary flash!--to the Big Bang.)

This theory says...

A large Mars-size molten object named Theia crashed into the young Earth at an oblique angle. The object sank within Earth's molten core. But the impact spun off debris that orbited the Earth for a short while and then coalesced into the a single object, the moon.

This coalescence may have taken less than a month but definitely no more than a century. PDQ in astronomical terms. (Pretty Darn Quick)

After the impact the Earth was spinning much faster than now, with an earth day only 5 hours long.

If your were alive back then and wanted a good night's sleep of about ten hours, you'd have to sleep through two nights. And two days...

...three days if you're a teenager. Of course after that you'd pull three all-nighters in a row to be awake for a normal 15 hours.

It seems there is still lots of debate over this hypothesis. There's some good evidence both fer and agin it...same for the other hypotheses.

Isotopic similarities between earth rocks and moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts gives some impetus to the Big Splash.

The Rings of Saturn...and Other Planets

The Rings of Saturn are not the only rings. All of the gas giant planets--Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune--have rings. It's just Saturn's are the easiest to see.

Also, one moon might have a ring around it: Rhea, one of Saturn's larger moons. Wouldn't that be a ring that zings around another ring?

Scientists think that Phobos, one of Mars' moons, will eventually breakup and become a ring. Phobos' has a very low orbit around Mars and getting lower all the time until, eventually, it is broken into pieces by Mars' gravity. Or so they think!

And they assume Earth once had a ring. That was after Theia hit the Earth and created the moon. What's that??? I'll tell you next time......

PIA07712_-_F_ring_animation.gif‎

Salty Ocean on a Moon of Saturn?

Extraterrestrial life frozen into the Rings of Saturn??? An salty ocean teeming with extraterrestrial life spews geysers from under the crust of Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons???

Today an article in the science journal Nature said that salty water is shooting out of Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. And that the conditions for life to exist might lie beneath that moon's surface. But another article published alongside it argues that the water isn't salty.

Whether the water jets spewing from Enceladus's south pole are salty or not seems to be a big deal. But I don't understand why, do you? It has something to do with whether there could be an ocean under Enceladus' surface and perhaps extraterrestrial life in that ocean. Can anyone explain why the salt is so important?

Aside from the salt issue, it is confirmed true that (1) There are huge plumes of water vapor and ice crystals being ejected from Enceladus' south pole and (2) One of the outermost rings around Saturn (the E Ring) is composed of ice particles that come mostly from this these plumes emanating (vocabulary flash!) from this moon. That was discovered just a few years ago by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

So this obscure little moon--just one-seventh the diameter or Earth's moon and just one of 61 (or more) moons circling Saturn--has been blowing smoke rings for millennia trying to stand out and get noticed...and has finally succeeded!

One commenter on Scientific American's website lists the moons of Saturn (Titan and Enceladus) and moons of Jupiter (Callisto, Ganymede and Europa) that are spots where space exploration has found evidence that extraterrestrial life might possibly exist. I'll have to research this to see how accurate that is.

Cool Planets #4: The Expanding Solar System

The solar system is expanding!

Not literally. What I mean is we keep learning that the Solar System stretches out further and further than we thought before. Starting from the center, here's what you will now find:

Sun
The 8 planets:

• Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

TNOs (Trans-Neptunian Objects) in these regions:

• Kuiper Belt (includes dwarf planets Pluto, Haumea and Makemake.)
• Scattered Disk (includes dwarf plant Eris)
• Detached Objects (includes Sedna, a likely dwarf planet)
• Oort Cloud (theoretical, not proven to exist)
• Chilly and dark out there. Very!

Wow! Now about this Oort Cloud...

• Supposedly where many comets stay most of the time.
• Extends out one-quarter of the way to Promixa Centauri, the nearest start to the sun.
• So far away that passing starts have more gravitational effect than the planets.

The Oort Cloud if it exists may be divided into:

• Hills Cloud, a disklike inner Oort Cloud.
• Outer Ort Cloud (OOC!) which is spherical.

I have decide there are two kinds of people in the world:

1. Those that don't see why this is interesting.
2. Those that think this is absolutely fascinating, like me, and clearly traveling in a more eccentric orbit!

Cool Planets #3: New Asteroids

Centaurs and Trojans are zooming around the sun. (No joke!)

There are a whole lot of other blobs racing around the same orbit as Jupiter and traveling just as fast as it does. (I'm serious!)

The asteroids have been sprung loose from their old location in the gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. (Well...kinda.)

Allow me to explain. Maybe you were taught that there are lots of asteroids--rocky, irregularly shaped objects--and these mostly reside in a band between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. And that these asteroids are presumably debris that never coalesced into a planet or the result of a planet that fell apart.

Well it turns out that there are lots of asteroids and things like them all over the solar system and not just in the Mars-Jupiter gap. The ones that orbit beyond Jupiter (but inside of Neptune) are called Centaurs. They tend to be balls of frozen gas rather than rocks. Just as Jupiter and the planets beyond it are mostly made of liquid and frozen gases, while the planets inward from Jupiter are rocky.

Now a bunch of these Centaurs go around in the same orbit as Jupiter, and they are all either one-sixth of an orbit ahead of Jupiter or one-sixth of an orbit behind it. These are called Trojan Centaurs or Jupiter Trojans. Pretty darn strange if you ask me!

Why do they go around exactly 60 degrees (one-sixth of of an orbit) ahead of or behind Jupiter? Well that's called a Lagrangian Point and there are mathematics that make Lagrangian points special and help keep Trojans from getting absorbed by gravity into the main object in the orbit. Look it up if you want to know more.

These Trojans go around in a kind a swarm, where they stay generally in the same position relative to Jupiter, but move around in the swarm under continual "nudges" from the gravity of the individual Trojans and the planets.

Neptune is the other planet with known Trojans. Just six of them have been spotted. All are "ahead of" Neptune, none are in the trailing Langrangian point. But astronomers think Neptune may turn out to have ten times as many Trojans as Jupiter.

Some of Saturn's major moons have smaller Trojan moons that orbit with them. They cluster in the Lagrangian points of the major moon's orbit around Saturn (not the Lagrangian points in Saturn's orbit around the Sun).

Are there any Earth Trojans keeping us company in the Lagrangian points of our orbit around the Sun? Astronomers have looked but so far all they've found is some "Lagrangian dust".

I found all this cool new stuff out when I helped my daughter with her astronomy homework. The Solar System has "gotten" a lot more complex and mysterious since I studied it in elementary school.

It is "so last century" to think of of asteroids as an orderly procession of rocks that dutifully parade around the Sun in the gap between Mars and Jupiter. Now we know that there are lots of small rocky or icy objects orbiting everywhere from Mercury to way beyond Pluto.

And some of them do amazing stunts like "racing" Jupiter around its own orbit--all the while keeping a precise "mathematically safe distance" behind or ahead of their huge competitor. A competitor whose powerful gravity wants to suck them in and devour them in its thick soupy atmosphere.

Actually, the Jupiter Trojans are only temporarily safe, but that's another story.

Cool Planets #2: Watch the Moon Wiggle

I just found out the coolest thing yet about the planets and solar system! The moon rocks! Go ahead, click that link and see the video that shows it.

Or you might say the moon wiggles! This is called libration! Make that one of your vocabulary flash cards list. Who says you can't have vocabulary learning fun?

Explanation: You already know that one side of the moon always faces the earth and the far side of the moon (erroneously called the dark side) always faces away. Well actually that's not one hundred percent accurate. Sometimes a little bit of the far side shows at the top, bottom, left or right or the moon. And of course a corresponding amount disappears temporarily on the opposide side of the moon as we look at it.

This side-to-side and top-to-bottom rocking looks like a wiggle as if the moon was hula hooping. If the moon had a ring, I bet it would spin like a hoola hoop. Moon fun. Fun moon.

Cool Planets #1: Dwarf Planets

When I was young in the early 1960s, I loved planets, the solar system, space exploration, astronautsand anything astronomy. I watched the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space capsule launches, including the moon landings. But our knowledge was rudimentary then.

It seemed simple. There were nine planets. Jupiter had twelve moons, Saturn had nine. But none of that is true anymore, as this blog will gradually reveal. NOW...

• There are eight planets and five dwarf planets.
• The eight planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
• The five dwarf planets are Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris. Cool!
  
• Poor Pluto was recently demoted from planet to dwarf planet.
• To be a planet or dwarf, an object must orbit the Sun and be massive enough to have become rounded by the pull of its own gravity.
  
• To graduate from dwarf to planet, an object must have cleared its neighboring regions of small objects. (The dwarf planets still have debris in their orbital space.

Where are these dwarf planets?

• Ceres is in the asteroid belt (between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter). It has about one-third of the mass of the entire asteroid belt, just by itself. Yow!
• Pluto, Haumea and Makemake are in the area beyond the orbit of Neptune, in what is called the Kuiper Belt.
• Eris, the largest of the (current) dwarf planets orbits nearly three times the distance from the Sun as Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. This is beyond the Kuiper Belt in what is called the Scattered Disk.

Sedna is likely to qualify as a dwarf planet based on its size. But it is so far away, astronomers haven't been able to make the call about its shape. It is beyond the Scattered Disk and is called a "Detached Object".

This all wows me. How cool is it that they keep discovering new planetoids? And that there are whole bands or regions of the Solar System beyond Pluto that they are just discovering and naming?

This makes it fun for kids and kid-like objects (like myself). Never fear, there is plenty of stuff for us to discover when we grow up to be astronomers, amateur or professional.

In fact, a NASA probe is headed to meet Ceres in 2015. Stay tuned!

Learning science is fun! Science fun! Fun science!

Games that Engage

Mom is the headmistress of our home school, making her the disciplinarian and therefore me the fun parent. So when I pitch in with homeschooling, they expect me to make it into a game. Good or bad, right or wrong, sometimes its better to go with the flow than try to change everything. So I often guide them toward online education games and fun activities that they will do on their own. My career has taught me how critical a strong vocabulary can be, online there are better ways than vocabulary flash cards to build word power. Songs can teach science. Astronomy fun brings out the kid in any of us. I wish they had all this fun online stuff when I was a kid!