Rambling (+ Zombies)

I cleaned and organized my shed this weekend.  I cannot overstate how much satisfaction this gave me.

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Mets swept the hapless Orioles this weekend.  First to last to first to last to second place.  Like being on a pogo stick.

Do they make pogo sticks anymore?  Are they considered too dangerous for children, and gone the way of the lawn dart?

Because I'd really like one.

I'd also like a didgeridoo, and have asked the Hux for one for my birthday.  We shall see.

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Enough rambling.  Here's some very dramatic video of the problem-plagued Japanese Hayabusa Asteroid explorer returning to Earth over Australia this morning.  The fireball is the probe burning up in the atmosphere; the little dot below and to the right is the hardened bit that contains asteroid samples.  It was recovered in the Australian outback this morning.

So, if things go all Andromeda Strain on us, and the zombie apocalypse begins, you'll know where it came from.

Randomness is not random.

This is a very dramatic image of the aftermath of a collision between two asteroids, hitting each other with the force of a very large nuclear explosion. It's a false-color image, so it doesn't look quite that dramatic in real life. But it still looks pretty cool. The "tail" is debris from the collision streaming off the main body, blown away by the solar wind like a comet tail (it doesn't glow like a comet tail because it's not made of ice).

The two asteroids are likely part of the same "family" of asteroids, and it might be the same family (Flora) that spawned the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

Families of asteroids are asteroids that are post-collision remnants of a breakup of a much larger parent asteroid.  They all share similar orbital characteristics, meaning their orbits are at similar speeds, similar shapes, and the same distance from the sun.  They also spin at roughly the same rate.  I am thrilled by the idea that asteroids don't move randomly, but instead are part of families that all move in similar ways.  Picture a scattered group of asteroids, all moving at the same pace, same direction, spinning in unison.  Pretty, eh?  The energy moving through a system organizes that system.  Randomness is not random. 

The picture is from Hubble.

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Got a Post of the Week award (my second!) from Hilary.  Thanks Hilary!  Go visit her.  She's a wonderful photographer.

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Lastly, the site is redesigned.  I got bored.  I'm still futzing with it; suggestions are welcome.

Dead Man's Revenge

Last month the University of Arizona predicted that an asteroid would collide with Earth, or more accurately with the Earth's atmosphere, on October 7. It did. This was the first time an asteroid on a collision course with Earth has been spotted before it entered our atmosphere. Bizarrely, in our media-saturated world, there was no footage of what must have been a huge fireball as it burned up in our atmosphere, over the Sudan in Africa. What was captured on video (a frame of which is shown above) was the aftermath: the windblown trail of the asteroid after it burned up.

The interesting bit about this image is that the trail shown in the picture is glowing. That's not reflected sunlight making the trail glow, it's light emitted by the trail itself. Cool, eh? These have been spotted before - they're called "persistent trains" - but no one knows exactly what causes them. Something to do with the ionized gas left in the wake of the asteroid. They come in all sorts of pretty colors too!

The photo is from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. It's a great way to start your morning!

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Remember the Dead Man's beer? Remember the mystery beer we found amid the cases, with the odd-sized bottle and no label?

We opened it and tried it last weekend. Three words: nasty, nasty, nasty. Daisy called it right. It was home-brewed beer gone very, very bad.

The YORP Effect

Since asteroids are basically just witless hunks of ice and rock, you'd think they'd live pretty boring, solitary lives. But you'd be wrong.

They pair up frequently, and become binary asteroids co-orbiting a central point. Sometimes they form threesomes. Woo-hoo! Sometimes they have tiny moons, tagging along after them. This picture is of Ida and Dactyl, an asteroid and its moon, but has always reminded me of a mother and child.


I love this picture. Dactyl is the little one.

Others hang around together in groups, often hitching rides in the LaGrangian points of planets (where the gravitational influences all balance out). i imagine them smoking cigarettes, whistling at girls, and trying to scrape up enough money for a six pack.

They also, improbably, begin to spin in the same direction, at the same speed, or specific resonances of that speed (it's called the YORP effect, named after the initials of the guys who figured it out). This has always struck me as particularly weird, that unrelated asteroids would mimic each other's orbital behavior. Apparently it has something to do with the pressure of sunlight on the surfaces of the asteroids, so that like sailboats on a lake, they'll all react similarly to the solar wind. But i like to think of it as a complex dance. It heartens me to realize that the universe rarely allows things to work alone as independent operators, whether those things be space rocks or ants or humans. I don't wanna say that randomness doesn't exist. Randomness is all. But from randomness spring unexpected patterns, complex structures, and hopelessly entangled relationships.

We are never, ever alone.

Even when we wanna be.