Happy holidays!
Lots of exciting space news, starting with the current conjunction of Venus and Jupiter that you must not miss (see item 1 below). And I’m especially excited to report that the Voyage Scale Model Solar System is now spreading to communities around the world (see item 5 below); if you’d like to bring Voyage to your community, please let me know and I’ll help put you in touch with the Voyage team. As usual, before I begin the news, just a quick update on books and events:
*Max Goes to Jupiter is now available; see my holiday special if you are interested in autographed copies of all my Max Science Adventure books. And for gifts for teenagers or grownups, please don’t forget Beyond UFOs.
*Radio/TV interviews: If you want to see or hear me “live,” catch my 3-minute interview this morning on 9News Denver, or my 3-hour radio interview last week on “Coast to Coast”; or, coming up, you can catch me on “paranormal radio” on Monday Dec. 1. (In case you’re wondering, I love bringing real science to folks who are obviously interested in space and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.)
*Book store signings: I’ll be at the following stores in Colorado:
Dec. 3 (Wed.), Barnes & Noble, Lone Tree, Shoppes at the Meadows, 7pm.
Dec. 10 (Wed.), Barnes & Noble, Loveland, The Shops at Centerra, 5pm
Best wishes,
Jeff
Contents
1. Venus and Jupiter — You can’t miss ’em!
2. Meteor lights up Canadian Sky– see the video and the fragments!
3. New images of planets around other stars
4. Mars Phoenix mission ends; rovers still going
5. Voyage goes national — Bring it to your community!
1. Venus and Jupiter — You can’t miss ’em!
If you’ve had a clear evening sky any time recently, you’ve surely noticed the two very bright objects near the western horizon. The brightest one (and closer to the western horizon) is Venus, and the other is Jupiter. They are coming even closer together over the next few days, and will be joined by the crescent moon very close by on Monday night. To view this beautiful conjunction, just go outside and hope it’s clear; no other equipment needed. You can read more about the conjunction at NASA science news; there’s also a beautiful photo of it on today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.
For Classroom Discussion:
*Any event in which two or more planets — or a planet and the Moon, or etc. — come together in the sky is called a “conjunction.” In this case, we have a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, joined Monday by the Moon. But while Venus and Jupiter will be very close in our sky, will they really be close together in space? (Answer: No. Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth, while Jupiter orbits the Sun at about five times Earth’s distance. So in reality, Jupiter will be hundreds of millions of miles farther away than Venus. They appear close together in the sky only because both will lie in nearly the same direction from Earth at this time, even though their distances will be very different.)
2. Meteor lights up Canadian Sky– see the video and the fragments!
Check out this great video clip showing the bright meteor that exploded over western Canada on Nov. 20. Most meteors are no bigger than peas, and burn up completely in the atmosphere; indeed, what we see as a “meteor” is not the small particle itself, but rather the bright flash of light created as its high speed heats the surrounding air to extremely high temperature. On rare occasions, however, a larger object will impact our atmosphere. The Nov. 20 Canadian meteor is estimated to have been created by a 10-ton rock from space, presumably a small asteroid or a piece of a larger asteroid, and fragments of this asteroid hit the ground after it exploded. Some fragments — called “meteorites” because they are rocks from space — have already been found. Because the meteor was filmed, scientists should be able to retrace its orbital path to figure out where it came from, and combining this knowledge with study of the meteorites should provide valuable scientific data about asteroids.
For Classroom Discussion:
*You are calling it a meteor, but I heard it called a “shooting star”; what is it? (Answer: A “shooting star” is a meteor. Long ago, people thought that meteors might actually be stars shooting across the sky, but now we know that meteors are created by particles or rocks from our own solar system, while stars are much, much farther away. So although we now know that meteors have nothing to do with the distant stars, the term “shooting star” is still commonly used as a synonym for “meteor.”)
*What’s the difference between a “meteor” and a “meteorite”? (Answer: Technically, the “meteor” is only the flash of light that we see as a particle or rock from space enters our atmosphere; a “meteorite” is a rock that we find on the ground that came from space. If you want to be even more technical, before the particle or rock enters our atmosphere it is called a “meteoroid” — but very few people make regular use of this term.)
*Where did this “rock from space” come from? (Answer: Its a “leftover” piece of rock from the birth of our solar system. According to well-established theory, the solar system was born from a cloud of gas and dust that contracted under its own gravity about 4 1/2 billion years ago. The gas contained many different elements and molecules, some of which were able to condense into solid form as the gas density grew. In the inner solar system, metal and rock condensed to make small solid particles, and these gradually stuck together and grew larger, ultimately forming the inner planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Any “leftover” material continued to orbit the Sun. By now, most of that material has either crashed into a planet, leaving an impact crater, or is safely orbiting the Sun as an asteroid in the asteroid belt. But once in awhile a rock still crashes down on a planet, and that’s exactly what happened in Canada on Nov. 20.)
3. New images of planets around other stars
We’ve now detected more than 300 planets around other stars, but until very recently nearly all of these detections had been indirect, most made by noticing slight motions of a star that we can attribute to the gravitational influence of orbiting planets. Recently, however, astronomers have begun to obtain what seem to be direct images of a few planets. One of these made the news recently because it appears to be the first clear detection of a planet around another star using visible light (as opposed to infrared light). You can read about it in this article in the New York Times.
4. Mars Phoenix mission ends; rovers still going…
The Mars Phoenix mission landed in the Martian Arctic in May, and made big news for finding water ice right under the spacecraft. This successful mission has now come to an end, and no signals from the spacecraft have been received since Nov. 2. Meanwhile, the “energizer bunnies of Mars” — the Spirit and Opportunity rovers — just keep on going! Expected to operate for just 3 months after landing in January 2004, the rovers are now approaching their 5-year anniversary of exploring the red planet. Click here to find out what they are up to now.
5. Voyage goes national — Bring it to your community!
Although most of you know me as an author, the longest-term project of my career has actually been work on creating scale models of our solar system as permanent exhibits, first in Boulder and then working on the Voyage project for the National Mall in Washington, DC. When we created Voyage, we hoped that it would be just the first of many “Voyage communities” that would have similar scale model solar systems as permanent educational exhibits. Thanks to Voyage team leader Jeff Goldstein, that is now becoming a reality, with new Voyage exhibits having just opened in Kansas City and at Space Center Houston. You can read here about how to bring Voyage to your community; or reply to this e-mail if you’d like me to help get you in touch with Jeff Goldstein and his team.
And don’t forget: New activities and more on my revamped web sites
Teachers — be sure to check out the new interactive tutorials on Seasons and Phases of the Moon posted in the Activities section of the Big Kid Science web site. These tutorials are taken from the Mastering Astronomy web site that goes with my college-level astronomy textbooks; Addison Wesley was gracious enough to let me post these two tutorial freely here. You’ll find another 20 tutorials on the Mastering site, if you are interested…