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Animation of a GIANT impact Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech bit.ly This artist’s concept shows a celestial body about the size of our moon slamming at great speed into a body the size of Mercury. nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence that a high-speed collision of this sort occurred a few thousand years ago around a young star, called HD 172555, still in the early stages of planet formation. The star is about 100 light-years from Earth. Spitzer detected the signatures of vaporized and melted rock, in addition to rubble, all flung out from the giant impact. Further evidence from the infrared telescope shows that these two bodies must have been traveling at a velocity relative to each other of at least 10 kilometers per second (about 22400 miles per hour). As the bodies slammed into each other, a huge flash of light would have been emitted. Rocky surfaces were vaporized and melted, and hot matter was sprayed everywhere. Spitzer detected the vaporized rock in the form of silicon monoxide gas, and the melted rock as a glassy substance called obsidian. On Earth, obsidian can be found around volcanoes, and in black rocks called tektites often found around meteor craters. Shock waves from the collision would have traveled through the planet, throwing rocky rubble into space. Spitzer also detected the signatures of this rubble. In the end, the larger planet is left skinned, stripped of its outer layers. The core of the smaller body and most of its surface were absorbed by …

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January 18, 2000 One of the most dramatic meteors in 10 years streaked across the skies of the Yukon Territory in Canada. Witnesses reported two sonic booms, a foul odor, and sizzling sounds heard all the way from Alaska through northwestern Canada. Based on readings from defense satellites and seismic monitoring stations, scientists estimate that the meteor detonated with the energy of two to three kilotons of TNT. “I have never seen anything quite like this before,” said Joe Clarke of Marshlake, Yukon, who saw the meteor at 0845 PST (1645 UT) on January 18. “When it started, the flash lit up the mountains 15 km away as bright as daylight, then it just drifted across the sky. The contrail looked to me like the ones left by shuttle launches. It just hung there for at least 1/2 hour. [It's the] wildest thing I could ever imagine seeing.” There was no major meteor shower on January 18. The Yukon fireball was probably what astronomers call a sporadic meteor. The inner solar system is filled with tiny dust particles that have bubbled off innumerable comets as they pass close to the Sun. These particles, called meteoroids, hit the Earth from random directions producing 2 or 3 sporadic meteors per hour every night. Scientists from NASA and the Department of Defense are interested in the the Yukon event. Samples of dust or rock fragments from the explosion could reveal the origin of the meteoroid. Defense specialists would also like to know what the meteoroid was made of to help …

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The Comets Tale 4 of 6 – This BBC Documentary looks at the Secrets of Death , Life and Gravity and the Ultimate Story of a Comet. The Historic origins in Mythology, but also their meaning within our Hub. This part looks at Comet composition, tail formation & the potential threats to the planet by looking at previous impacts and their environmental effects, such as through Air Bursts & examples like the 1908 Siberian Impact in Tunguska and the 1994 Jupiter impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy (SL9). For more Information on the Tunguska event see en.wikipedia.org and also see www.psi.edu For more information on the 1994 Jupiter Shoemaker-Levy collision see eg www2.jpl.nasa.gov

A Breif Astronomical Explanation.

Follow Jeremy the star from birth untill death.

Photos of Earth from Near Space Weather Balloon

Near space photographic weather balloon. In conjunction with Mr. Clapper’s Honors Chem class, and Mr. mccauley, we expanded on a recent MIT experiment and send a weather balloon into near space equipped with a camera (that the electronics students hacked into to take time laps photos), and real time gps tracking. We were able to take photos of near space and the curvature of the earth *End story for the space balloon- After about 58 minutes of flight time the balloon landed in Hickory, about an hour and a half away by car. We were able to track the landing using the gps on the cheap track phone and used Google Map to se photos of the yard where the balloon had landed. We drove out to find the owner of the property not home and the balloon 75 ft up in a tree in his back yard. We fashioned a long pole (12 ft?) out of pool cues, meter sticks, and duct tape we had in the car and I climbed up the tree with the pole. We were unable to retrieve it on the first attempt and had to drive out to a hardware store to buy a hook to tape to the end of the pole. We retrieved the balloon without the resident ever knowing we were there or that many Christ School students had been looking at his back yard via Google Earth.

Supernova 1987A ( Ring Around Supernova 1987A )

SN 1987A was a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. It occurred approximately 51.4 kiloparsecs from Earth,[1] close enough that it was visible to the naked eye. It could be seen from the Southern Hemisphere. It was the closest observed supernova since SN 1604, which occurred in the Milky Way itself. The light from the supernova reached Earth on February 23, 1987. As the first supernova discovered in 1987, it was labeled “1987A”. Its brightness peaked in May with an apparent magnitude of about 3 and slowly declined in the following months. It was the first opportunity for modern astronomers to see a supernova up close.

The Crab Nebula

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A supernova (pl. supernovae) is a stellar explosion. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months. During this short interval, a supernova can radiate as much energy as the Sun could emit over its entire life span.[1] The explosion expels much or all of a star’s material[2] at a velocity of up to 30000 km/s (a tenth the speed of light), driving a shock wave[3] into the surrounding interstellar medium. This shock wave sweeps up an expanding shell of gas and dust called a supernova remnant.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech bit.ly This artist’s concept shows a celestial body about the size of our moon slamming at great speed into a body the size of Mercury. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence that a high-speed collision of this sort occurred a few thousand years ago around a young star, called HD 172555, still in the early stages of planet formation. The star is about 100 light-years from Earth. Spitzer detected the signatures of vaporized and melted rock, in addition to …

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For more information: space.newscientist.com Watch an animation comparing views of SN 2006gy at different wavelengths. Courtesy of NASA/CXC/M Weiss