Chelya-boom-boom
A meteor burned up above the skies of central Russia this morning, resulting in an aerial explosion and shockwave whose effects injured hundreds near Chelyabinsk. It brings to mind these lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags sheen
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced betweenEvents like this are not rare in Earth’s atmosphere, happening at least once per decade. What made this one special was its chance occurrence over a populated area and the fact that so many Russians have cameras running on their dashboards, like, all the time. Central Russia is no stranger to extreme aerial explosions due to space debris entering the atmosphere, most famously with 1908’s Tunguska Event, a several megaton aerial explosion of a comet fragment that knocked down 80 million trees.
Details about today’s meteor event are a little fuzzy, but I plugged some data into Purdue’s Impact Earth! meteor event calculator (which is a super fun way to pretend you’re destroying Earth) to see if I could nail down the energy released by this fireball.
From the videos I’ve seen, it looks like this thing entered the atmosphere at a pretty shallow angle, maybe 15 degrees from the horizon. It would have to be pretty dense rock in order to make it that far into the atmosphere without disintegrating, so I plugged its density in as 3,000-5,000 kg/m3. Russian officials reported its aerial velocity at about 15 km/second and that it was about the size of a dinner table, so 4 meters across? If you tweak the velocity, density, size and angle a little, you get an airburst of between 2 and 5 kilotons of TNT, or a little less than half the strength of the atomic bomb that exploded over Hiroshima, and an explosion altitude upwards of 50,000 feet.
Seems like a pretty accurate calculation, although the actual altitude must have been more like 30,000 feet to produce the shockwave that resulted in all the injuries. Play around with the Impact Earth calculator and let me know if you get anything better!
Although asteroid 2013 DA14 is making a close flight by Earth today, zipping inside of some of our satellites, but this meteor event almost certainly had nothing to do with that. Space is full of stuff, and every so often we are reminded of that in spectacular fashion.
BONUS: This kind of thing happens all over the solar system. Check out this scorched explosion remnant on Mars!
(GIF via amalucky)
Just to clarify, the asteroid skimming through our little circle of space is named 2012 DA14. There’s no danger of it hitting us, but a small one that it could hit one of our geosynchronous satellites.
We’re not sure exactly what its composition is, but if it were to impact it would probably be similar to the Barringa impact in Arizona and a bit bigger than the mentioned Tunguska event.
The Chelyabinsk meteorite (we add the -ite after a meteor survives our atmosphere and makes an impact) is estimated to be about 4m - DA14 is closer to 50m. And NASA estimates that up to 500,000 objects of that size cross Earth’s orbit, of which we are aware of maybe 1 or 2 percent.
As both of these asteroids indicate, we don’t know nearly as much about what is out there and potentially dangerous to us. Jeffrey Kluger of Time sums it up:
Space is an exceedingly random place. Everything in the known universe may be governed by some pretty hard laws of physics, but so are BBs in a jar when you shake them up and down. That doesn’t stop things from getting very chaotic inside. The same extreme arbitrariness is worth keeping in mind as we contemplate our planet’s close brush with an asteroid this week.
NGC 2237: The Rose
“A Rose by any other color, smells just as sweet.”
Would the Rosette Nebula by any other name look as sweet? The bland New General Catalog designation of NGC 2237 doesn’t appear to diminish the appearance of this flowery emission nebula.
Image Copyright: Terry Hancock
Inside the nebula lies an open cluster of bright young stars designated NGC 2244. These stars formed about four million years ago from the nebular material and their stellar winds are clearing a hole in the nebula’s center, insulated by a layer of dust and hot gas.
Ultraviolet light from the hot cluster stars causes the surrounding nebula to glow. The Rosette Nebula spans about 100 light-years across, lies about 5000 light-years away, and can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros). [**]
(Source: kenobi-wan-obi)
Turaco | Michael Rumiz
Happy Birthday, Pale Blue Dot – the iconic image of Earth seen from space, which inspired Carl Sagan, was taken on this day in 1990.
I’ll never not reblog the Pale Blue Dot.
![If [insert science] hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/f833e076c0a3659d2f8578d941f345df/tumblr_mhnsm5CcjA1rtwf4xo1_500.jpg)
If [insert science] hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.
(Source: science-and-logic)
A Digital Heart
Using the world’s second most-powerful supercomputer, Sequoia, Lawrence Livermore and IBM scientists have simulated the human heart at never-before-seen resolution. By dividing the muscular organ into tiny units (seen above), the electrophysiology and mechanics of heartbeats were accurately created inside of a computer. Some of their methods approach single cell resolution!
What’s the point? An accurate simulation of the heart can let scientists research heart problems like arrhythmia without cutting anyone open, and even simulate the effects of certain heart drugs. Perhaps, one day it will help doctors diagnose heart problems just by comparing your heartbeat to one inside a computer.
Of course, if your heart problems are more of the “Cupid” variety, then even this computer can’t help you. It will take a lot more computing power than this to figure out love.
For more about this project, check out this guest article from “Cupid” on Energy.gov
Creativity in Science
“They should have sent a poet,” whispers Ellie in the 1997 film Contact. She is a radio astronomer, and when sets eyes on an alien galaxy for the first time, she has no words for its beauty. Despite being fiction, I think this interestingly highlight for pursuits in arts and sciences to be cross-disciplinary. Many students lose interest in science at an early age because it’s largely “taught to the test”, and so there is a decreased focus on creativity and imagination. Even practical experiments allow little room for creativity, as students all expected to get the same results—and although this is important for teaching the scientific method, careers in science are not entirely like this: they require creativity and innovation. The infographic above shows the results of Creativity and Education: Why it Matters, a survey by research firm Edelman Berland (note: it is not specifically science-related). The research shows that that 85% of participants think creativity is crucial for problem solving in their career, yet 32% don’t feel comfortable thinking creatively. Yet, creativity is what keeps science moving forwards, because it fosters new connections and therefore gives rise to not only practical innovation, but also the creation of new knowledge. Scientists and engineers frequently encounter problems where they must use abstract, creative thinking, and they should be equipped to do this. From an early age, students should be encouraged to let their imaginations run wild, and also to use scientific reasoning to assess and test their ideas—and this approach of being open to multiple disciplines would be beneficial not only to science, but also foster innovation in other disciplines too. In Einstein’s words: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
At top, the Soyuz that we flew here and will fly home in May. Below, the Progress that undocked and burnt up.
Seriously, if you aren’t following Col. Hadfield, you are missing out on so many beautiful pictures and general astronaut cleverness.
