Near-Earth objects and close calls

A bit more information on that one comet I found here, I also read that so far it would be the largest visitor from the Oort cloud to make it this close to the Sun, although that was on an article in spanish that did not cite any sources.


I also found a link to an organization called the IAU (international Astronomical Union) where the observations are published, though I must admit that they look truly foreign to me, although on their home page they have a tally of NEO discovered which as of today stands as follows:

Near-Earth Objects Discovered​

THIS MONTH:147
THIS YEAR:1279
ALL TIME:26113
 
Comet shedding heavy metals and other interesting particles.

May 19, 2021
This video starts by showing an animation of comet C/2016 R2 (PANSTARRS), which was done using real images taken by the SPECULOOS telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. The video then zooms in on a blue comet. In a new study done with the UVES instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, a team has spotted heavy metal atoms in the inner atmosphere of the comet, a discovery illustrated at the end of the video. There we see the spectrum of the comet and in particular the iron (Fe, blue) and nickel (Ni, orange) lines, marking the presence of the two elements in the atmosphere of the comet. More information and download options: http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso2...
The exceptional new comet 2014 UN271 is 100 to 300 km in diameter, the largest object from the Oort Cloud ever discovered. Now at magnitude 19, its perihelion will be in 2031 as far away as Saturn, its brightness could then be at magnitude 16
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The exceptional new comet 2014 UN271 is 100 to 300 km in diameter, the largest object from the Oort Cloud ever discovered. Now at magnitude 19, its perihelion will be in 2031 as far away as Saturn, its brightness could then be at magnitude 16
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Cometary activity has been observed recently (today) in the form of an elongated coma. It may become brighter (between magnitude 13 and magnitude 9) . The good news is that there may be time to intercept it with a probe.

SpaceWeather.com
Thursday, Jun. 24, 2021
HUGE COMET DISCOVERY: Astronomers have just discovered a comet so big, it might actually be a minor planet. The object is named 2014 UN271. Astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein found it in archival images from the Dark Energy Survey. It appears to be about 100 km wide, 2 or 3 times bigger than record-breaking Comet Hale-Bopp of the 1990s.

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Now for the bad news. Although 2014 UN271 is falling toward the sun, we may never see it with our naked eyes. At closest approach in early 2031, the behemoth comet will be just outside the orbit of Saturn, too far for naked-eye viewing. Some astronomers are estimating a maximum brightness near magnitude +17, about the same as Pluto's moon Charon.

It's still an amazing discovery. 2014 UN271 has an extremely elongated orbit stretching from ~the neighborhood of Saturn out to a staggering distance of almost a light year. At the far reaches of its orbit, 2014 UN271 barely feels the sun's gravity and could be snatched out of the Solar System altogether by the ephemeral pull of galactic tides. Discovering such a traveler during its brief time among the planets is very lucky indeed.

There is talk of a space mission to intercept 2014 UN271. The European Space Agency is building a probe called Comet Interceptor designed to investigate comets coming from deep space. It, or something like it, might be able to visit 2014 UN271 a decade from now.

With an object like this, we have to expect surprises. 2014 UN271 certainly poses no threat to Earth, but it could brighten more (or less) than expected. Multiple groups of astronomers have already detected signs of out-gassing even though 2014 UN271 is still beyond Uranus. Early signs of activity may bode well for future visibility through small telescopes if not the unaided eye.

To learn more about this object, we encourage reading the Twitter feed of co-discoverer Pedro Bernardinelli.
 
Perhaps it was already mentioned somewhere on the forum, but apparently there is going to be a very intense (historic levels) meteor shower/storm in almost a year. On 30/31 of May, 2022.

The Russian astronomy/meteorites enthusiasts are abuzz and already work on organizing a trip to Mexico to watch it, because apparently Mexico is going to be the best viewing location for that. But it will be visible in other locations as well.

Here's an info about it.

73P-ids Meteor Storm​

Active: May 30/31
Peak Night: May 30/31
When can it be observed?: 8:11 p.m. to 10:45 p.m. The shower may end before midnight.
Approximate peak hour: 9:45 p.m.-10:45p.m.
Expected dark sky rate: 10,000-100,000 meteors per hour(!)
Good viewing conditions

The shower’s radiant is on the east side of Boötes the Herdsman, about 10 degrees north of the brilliant star Arcturus, high in the northeastern sky. 73P-ids are an offshoot of the usually unremarkable Tau Herculid meteor shower. Both showers are produced by comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3. The nucleus of comet 73P broke into several pieces during its returns in 1995, 2006, and 2017. In 2022 the Earth is predicted to pass through the fresh swarm of nucleus fragments, and, based on computer simulations performed by several meteor experts, a brief meteor storm of historic levels should be the likely outcome!

About 50 (mostly faint) meteors per hour may be seen as soon as darkness falls, but vast numbers of bright meteors may appear around 10:15 p.m. The shower should be visible across North America.

Notes: The moon is new and will not interfere with this exceedingly rare opportunity to observe a likely meteor storm.
 
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Unfortunately for us amateurs on the ground, don’t expect to see a show on the scale of Halley’s comet. While it’s too early to tell for sure, Deen calculates that 2014 UN271 would, at best, become about as bright as Pluto in the night sky, but more likely it’ll reach the brightness of Pluto’s moon Charon. Still, we’ll probably get some amazing shots from telescopes and observatories of the time

I think it's important to consider the visualization of the orbit of this object, and how it may relate to something similar like Nemesis and/or a twin of the sun, and how it's communicated to lay folk who have no interest, no clue and dismiss anything that messes with their reality. [According to science] this is a large object, on an eccentric orbit, over a very long period in human years.

Imagining myself in the shoes of an ordinary person who cares about the day-to-day living, the immediate stresses of their life and family and wanted to fight this logic, conceptually if I was told that there's a twin of the sun, or a long period object that comes our way infrequently with the ability to also disrupt the outer solar system and throw some rocks that tagged along for the ride at us, I might say:

- We can't see it, and if it's really a threat, we will see it.
- Comets orbit the Sun and get very close to it - sometimes they even hit the sun! If we are in the right spot, we'll see them as they pass, otherwise, who cares?
- NASA and other space nerds have already figured this out.
- Stop making me think.

The object that's discussed will at it's closest point, still remain outside the orbit of Saturn. That's insane! If anything, it's impressive that this has been picked up in the first place (at least with regular tools and equipment).
 

Bright meteor fireball captured over Switzerland


Here are the two videos uploaded to the American Meteor Society website relating to this event. Both were taken using cameras from The European AllSky7 fireball network.

The first video shows the meteor fireball exploding and the surrounding sky looked quite 'grainy' which I thought may have been due to the camera (AMS73 Monteggio).


But the other video, taken from a different camera (AMS64 Wangen), shows a strange shape in the sky. I checked the AllSky7 website and both cameras in question are fully operational with no irregularities reported.


This is a screenshot of the strange shape in the second video.

Strange Swiss meteor fireball.JPG

What do you think? Further evidence of our changing atmosphere? The veil between 4D/3D thinning? UFO cloaking?
 
It does look like something to do with the lens. More so because in the footage from the first camera we don't see that shape even though it's recording at the same time as the second.
It looks like there are also two artefacts (moisture or dried droplets perhaps) in the bottom right, with curved outlines at the top edges and illuminated by the ground light sources. It looks like the light from the fireball hit a third artefact to the left at just the right angle to highlight it's whole shape which also possesses a curved top outline.
 
Jun 30, 2021
NASA recently received its first sample of asteroid Ryugu, which was returned to Earth last December by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft. This is one of the first samples to leave Japan for preliminary investigation. As deputy leader of the mineralogy-petrology subteam for the preliminary analysis effort, Mike Zolensky was one of the first scientists to examine the sample to determine its basic nature. Alongside Zolensky, Jangmi Han from the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division, and James Martinez of the Structural Engineering Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston worked together to complete an investigation of the sample. Sample analyses were performed in the Scanning Electron Microscopy Lab in Johnson’s Structural Engineering Division. This was successfully completed within five days. Zolensky is one of a hundred investigators worldwide to receive a sample from JAXA. Preliminary sample analyses are continuing at Johnson. Studying carbonaceous asteroids like Ryugu could help scientists better understand how the solar system formed. Last Updated: Jun 30, 2021 Editor: Nilufar Ramji Tags: Asteroids


Jupiter picks up another moon. Eighty and counting.


Comets visible in July Comet C / 2020 T2 (Palomar) will remain the brightest with magnitude 10 at the beginning of the month observable with small telescopes. On the other hand, both comet 15P / Finlay in magnitude 11 and C / 2019 L3 (ATLAS) rising ..

Surprise surprise the Asteroid Is Metal and has magnetic property's, (mirth).

 
A newly-discovered asteroid will fly past Earth on July 3, 2021.

Posted by Teo Blašković on July 2, 2021

 
This needs more investigation, but apparently a meteorite exploded over Iceland last night. With it being near volcano territory people weren't sure whether it was volcanic/seismic, or a meteorite; perhaps it was both with one affecting the other. One on the ground observer claims to have seen the sky light up and is sure it 'was definitely not from the volcano'.

(the last few tweets are posted as images rather than links because doing so repeats the seismic graph taking up too much space)

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This follows the lull in activity at Fagradalsfjall, that soon after started up again:

 
A brilliant Bolide in Idaho
The report:

We received 17 reports about a fireball seen over ID, MT, UT, WA and WY on Sunday, July 4th 2021 around 04:51 UT.
Looked like a multi color firework going down with a tail, then changed to a bright light that got brighter and disappeared. So bright I had to look away.
Address
Boise, ID
Latitude 43° 37' 36.5'' N (43.63°) Longitude 116° 11' 5.76'' W (-116.18°)



Flashback: Video
Daylight Meteor/Asteroid/Fireball of 1972 - Government coverup- true size
The Fireball of 1972 was actually of asteroid class. Approx. 1 miles in diameter. North America would have been in nuclear winter, had it impacted. This was a near miss. Also known as the Rocky mountain meteor of 1972. Believe nothing, verify everything, as Gurdjieff said. It was NOT 45 feet in diameter, but much larger. The photo doesn't lie. Previous calculations are far from accurate. This was a continent killer. As well, likely a government coverup. I was nearly directly under the point of perigee in Idaho. At this close range it was huge in the sky. Look at the photo in this video. Do you REALLY believe you could see an only 45ft. diameter object at 125 miles range? One cannot even see the body of an airliner straight up at 30,000 ft. That it was only 45 ft in diameter is a farce. My data at Wikipedia on this has been censored, including link to this video. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grea.

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THIS EARLY MORNING THE SPORADIC BOLID #SPMN040721 it flew over Castilla-La Mancha at 0h48m09s TU. Its cometary origin is exemplified in its speed and fragile nature of an aggregate that led it to disintegrate in a final flash.@V_Cayuelasfrom La Aparecida (Alacant

By Katie Hunt, CNN
A new study suggests that dinosaurs were in decline for as many as 10 million years before the asteroid that hit off the coast of what is now Mexico dealt the final death blow and that this decline impeded their ability to recover.

It was an asteroid strike that doomed the dinosaurs to extinction 66 million years ago.

But what were their lives like before it hit? Whether they were thriving or already teetering on the brink has long been a matter of debate for paleontologists.

A new study suggests that dinosaurs were in decline for as many as 10 million years before the city-sized asteroid that hit off the coast of what is now Mexico dealt the final death blow and that this decline impeded their ability to recover from the asteroid’s aftermath.
The strike created the 125-mile-wide Chicxulub crater, unleashing climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, ultimately killing off three quarters of life on the planet.

The researchers looked at a total of 1,600 dinosaur fossils representing 247 dinosaur species to assess species diversity and extinction rates for six dinosaur families.

“We looked at the six most abundant dinosaur families through the whole of the Cretaceous (period), spanning from 150 to 66 million years ago, and found that they were all evolving and expanding and clearly being successful,” said study lead author, Fabien Condamine, a researcher from the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier in France in a news release.

“Then, 76 million years ago, they show a sudden downturn. Their rates of extinction rose and in some cases, the rate of origin of new species dropped off.”

The authors of the study that published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications said that global climate cooling during the Late Cretaceous period (100 to 66 million years ago) may have contributed to the decline of non-avian dinosaurs. (Avian or bird-like dinosaurs survived the asteroid strike and evolved into the birds we see today).

They also said that particularly successful families of dinosaurs like hadrosaurs may have outcompeted other herbivores, leading to a decline in diversity of those dinosaurs.

The researchers used computer modeling techniques that accounted for uncertainties including incomplete fossil records to converge on the most probable result.

“In the analyses, we explored different kinds of possible causes of the dinosaur decline,” said Mike Benton, another co-author of the study and a professor from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences.

“It became clear that there were two main factors, first that overall climates were becoming cooler, and this made life harder for the dinosaurs which likely relied on warm temperatures.”Then, the loss of herbivores made the ecosystems unstable and prone to extinction cascade.

We also found that the longer-lived dinosaur species were more liable to extinction, perhaps reflecting that they could not adapt to the new conditions on Earth,” Benton said in a news releaseTheir research contradicts other recent studies, using alternative methods, that have laid the blame for dinosaur extinction solely on the asteroid and found that there’s no strong evidence that dinosaurs were in decline before the asteroid hit — that in fact they may have continued to thrive.

Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist and postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Vigo in Spain, who was not involved in the study, said that the authors had assigned too much importance to the cooling trend toward the end of the Cretaceous period. He said that dinosaurs had weathered similar climate fluctuations throughout the 165 million years they roamed the Earth.

Joseph Bonsor, a doctoral candidate at the University of Bath, who was an author of a study that found that dinosaurs weren’t on the way out before the asteroid hit, said the ultimate limiting factor in this type of work is the patchy nature of the fossil record — the study predominantly relied on North American fossils.

“There are huge biases in the fossil record due to a number of factors (mainly geographical and economical, but also more personal biases like palaeontologists focusing on looking for one species for example, like Tyrannosaurus),” he said via email.

“The fact that multiple groups of scientists working on the exact same question at the same time can come up with completely opposite results further enforces this, that there is a great need for further data collection, i.e. digging up more dinosaurs and finding out where they lived and how successful they truly were,” he added.
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Wow! If I understood correctly though, the scientist think they have discovered 45 new moons that are at least 800 Meters in diameter around Jupiter and (theoretically) estimate that there could be around 600 of such moons in total (bigger than 800 Meters) around Jupiter by extrapolating from the sky area they have searched in and found those 45 moons (about one square degree). Further:



As I understood it, they think they have discovered those additional 45 Moons in photos that were already taken in 2010:



Further:



So I'm assuming wide means pretty far away from Jupiter, but still orbiting it?

In the official List of the 79 Jupiter Satellites, the 7 smallest moons have a diameter of 1 km. All of this further begs the question of course how many of those Satellites are really new additions although by now the sheer number of "new moons" and additional high number of potential "new moons" really makes one wonder.

And another new moon of Jupiter has been discovered, this time from an amateur:


So we are left in confusion now how many moons Jupiter actually has. If I count right, we have now at least 46 more moons than the still official number of 79 moons.
 
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