THE MOON AND THE PLEIADES
The following article was
released by the Astronomy Magazine website on February 12, 2005.
A Pleiades welcome - Few sights inspire backyard
stargazers more than seeing the Moon pass near another prominent object. It
happens most frequently with the bright planets and a handful of 1st-magnitude
stars because the Moon returns to the vicinity of each once a lunar month. The
best such events in February are gibbous Moon appearances near Jupiter (the
27th) and Saturn (the 19/20th).
Much less often, the Moon makes a nice pass by a bright deep-sky object.
These events are rare because only one deep-sky object - the Pleiades star
cluster (M45) - combines the two essential ingredients: It shines bright enough
to stand up to the Moon's brilliance, and it lies close enough to the Moon's
path across the sky that our natural satellite occasionally comes near. Add in
the fact that the cluster isn't so bright that it can rival a gibbous or Full
Moon, and it's a wonder these close conjunctions aren't even more uncommon.
When the First Quarter Moon passes 1.2° south of the Pleiades the night
of February 15/16, it marks the objects' first close encounter since the early
1990s. The long drought stems from the Pleiades' position relative to the lunar
orbit. The cluster lies at a declination of 24°, on the northern part of the
Moon's orbital path. For the past dozen years, the Moon has been well south of
the Pleiades each time it made its monthly pass.
The good news: The Moon and Pleiades will be close each month for the
next few years. The slow shift of the lunar orbit means once these events
begin, they keep going for a good while. Later this year, the Moon actually
starts to cross in front of the cluster. The two won't always appear real close,
and at least half the time, the Moon's brightness will overwhelm M45. (The best
views of a waxing crescent Moon near the cluster will come on spring evenings.)
It's a series of events you won't want to miss.
Below
is a zoomed in view of the moon and the Pleiades as they will be seen
from Jerusalem on March 15,
2005. The moon will be a waxing large crescent
about 30% illuminated at that time.
Moon and Pleiades on March
15, 2005
ARTICLE ON TSUNAMI MIRACLE
Last month I mentioned an article that I heard was in the
Washington Post concerning a unique miracle that occurred during the December 26, 2004 tsunami
that hit various locations in the Indian Ocean. I asked if anyone knew where I could get a
hold of that article. I received
numerous responses in my e-mail with links to various news sources, including
the Washington Post, on that story.
Thank you to all of those who responded with the information. I also had a number or requests for me to
send the article if it was found. Many
of you have seen this story, but for those who havent heard the story yet,
here it is. I decided to go with the
article or version from CBN.com (Christian
Broadcast Network).
Standing Against the
Waves: One Man's Tsunami Miracle
By George Thomas
CBN News Sr. Reporter
CBN.com
BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka - The whole world knows about the devastating
tsunami tragedy in Asia. But there were also stories of incredible
miracles during that crisis, including one man who stood against the waves to
save some orphans.
Daylan Sanders, along with 28 children, his
wife and three-year-old daughter, found themselves and their small beachside
orphanage in the path of a massive tidal wave. A 30-foot-high wall of water,
stretching from one end of the beach to the other, was racing towards them.
Sanders heard a thunderous roar, turned around
and looked out at the ocean. He said, It was like a marauding force, like a
thousand freight trains charging at [us] at the same time.
Sanders' wife Kohila was in the kitchen with
their daughter when she saw the monster wave approach. She exclaimed, I could
not bear to look. I just prayed, 'Lord, help us! Lord, help us!'
With only seconds to spare, Sanders yelled at
the top of his lungs, and ordered everyone at the orphanage to run to a boat
that was afloat on the side of the house. He said, I heaved them into the
boat, all the children, and then I asked for my daughter, you know, and one of
the older girls thrust her into my arms.
All of this was happening as the wall of sea continued to gain strength.
Sanders said, Something miraculous had to
happen if we were going to get out of this alive.
It was at that moment, faced with certain
death, that a scripture verse from Isaiah popped into his mind He said, And I
just stretched my hands (shows what he did) and said, 'Based on the strength of
the Scriptures, where it says that when the enemy comes in like a flood, the
Spirit of the Lord shall raise up a standard against it.
Speaking to the wave, Sanders said, 'I command
you in the name of Jesus, stop!'
Sanders said that what happened next was
nothing short of a miracle. The wall of water that was seconds away from
engulfing them began to slow down.
It became sluggish, it was straining against
what I thought at the moment was some invisible wall, Sanders explained. It
was trying to break free, but something was holding it back. The only force or
power that could have stopped it was the power of God. And God with His power
and with His hand slowed it down and stopped the wave for us, and gave us the
time to get away.
But before they could get away, they had to
first get the boat they had all jumped into, started.
Sanders yelled, "Pull on the starter
cord! And with one pull, it started. That again was another miracle, because it
takes three or four pulls before it starts.
They escaped the first wave. But their ordeal
was far from over. While crossing the lagoon, a second wave began bearing down
on them, threatening to overtake them from behind.
According to Sanders, it was during the second
wave that he ordered the captain of his small vessel to turn the boat around
and head straight for the oncoming wave.
Sevan, an experienced fisherman, was at the
helm of the boat. He told Sanders that attacking the wave head-on was extremely
dangerous.
Sevan said, I thought we were all going to
die that day.
But Sanders had made up his mind. He said, I
said no! I said you do what I tell you to do. Go back, turn and come, nose
first, and we are going to take this head on!
And so, the small fiberglass boat, 15-feet
long, with a 15-horsepower engine and 32 people on board, went full throttle
into the wave.
Sanders said, We hit the bottom of the wave,
and it kept pushing us a way back, and we kept straining, and I said, In the
name of Jesus, we are coming up! And again, it was the hand of God that lifted
the boat and He placed us right on top of the wave!
CBN News asked Sanders, You were the chief
rescuer, right here?
Sanders replied, No! The Chief Rescuer was up
there (pointing to heaven)! We were only playing a small part.
And an hour later, the whole ordeal was over.
Sanders, his family and the 28 children had survived the deadly tsunami. But
the orphanage he took 20 years to build was destroyed in a matter of seconds.
Sanders gave CBN News a tour of the devastation. Walking
through the rubble, he said, This was our recreation room right here, and only
just a fraction of it is left. The sea literally lifted entire blocks, chucks
of metal into the ocean.
Sanders said over 70 percent
of their orphanage was
damaged.
One of the few and most precious things that
did not get destroyed during the tsunami was his Bible. Sanders found it buried
under two feet of sand. And except for the missing cover, Sanders said, not a
single page from the Bible was missing.
Sanders remarked, Jesus said 'Heaven and
earth shall pass away, but My words will not pass
away! Tsunamis can take anything and everything from us, but the Word of God
never can [be taken away], because it's more powerful than anything in this
whole world.
CBN News was on hand this past week to witness
the first Sunday service held at the orphanage since the disaster.
Sanders says he is determined to rebuild the place. He
said, I feel very strongly that this is where God wants me to be, and this is
where God wants me to witness for Him. And all these children you see here are
one day going to be powerfully used by God.
UPDATE ON ASTEROID 2004 MN4
The following update on Asteroid 2004 MN4 is
an article by Bill Cooke that was released by the Astronomy Magazine website on
February 10, 2005.
Will Earth break
up 2004 MN4?
An asteroid
buzzing past Earth in 2029 will come closer than expected and may not survive
intact.
For a few days at the end of December, an
asteroid named 2004 MN4 looked like it might be Earth's biggest impact threat.
Based on available information about its orbit, astronomers gave odds of 1 in
37 that 2004 MN4 would strike Earth April 13, 2029. But astronomers found images of the
asteroid taken before its discovery, giving them a longer arc of its orbit, and
the collision threat evaporated. It appeared the rock would miss Earth by 40,000
miles (64,400 kilometers).
Now, radar measurements suggest MN4 will
miss us by half that distance and come so close Earth's gravity could rip it
apart.
Between January 27 and 30, a team led by
Lance Benner of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, tracked the
asteroid using the enormous Arecibo radio telescope
in Puerto Rico. By bouncing radio waves off the
asteroid, the astronomers received precise information about its position and
speed that enabled them to plot the object's course over the next 24 years with
great accuracy.
The results shocked some astronomers. The
new orbit indicates the asteroid will miss Earth by 22,000 miles (35,400 km),
passing just inside the belt of geostationary satellites.
A miss is still a miss, so what's the big
deal? At first glance, the change in the miss distance doesn't seem surprising.
Astronomers are constantly updating comet and asteroid orbits, and changes are
expected.
But for 2004 MN4, the change in the miss
distance was greater than the error computed in the December analyses. Put
another way, 2004 MN4 is now outside the uncertainty box the region
astronomers thought would contain the object's most likely locations on April 13, 2029.
The asteroid, whose chance of striking
Earth was once computed to be improbably high, has presented us with the
improbable once again. Scientists place great store in their error estimates
sometimes too much. One of the most prominent asteroid researchers, Clark
Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Boulder, Colorado, notes that who
deal with low-probability, high-consequence events, like airplane crashes,
place very little faith in error estimates. Perhaps, he suggests, this is a
lesson the asteroid community needs to learn.
But there's another reason for concern.
According to Dan Durda, another SWRI astronomer, 2004 MN4 is likely to be a
"rubble-pile" asteroid, consisting of material only loosely held
together by gravity. Because the asteroid will pass us at just 2.5 times
Earth's diameter, tidal forces could tear it apart. The result would be a trail
of rocks drifting slowly apart with the passage of time. One or more of these
might hit Earth in the more distant future, creating a spectacular fireball as
it burns up in the atmosphere.
Although a miss in 2029 is virtually
certain, if MN4 survives its Earth flyby, astronomers cannot rule out potential
collisions in the 2030's. Therefore, 2004 MN4 still holds at 1 on the Torino
impact hazard scale, a classification designed to quantify the impact risk of
near-Earth asteroids (similar to the Ritcher scale for earthquakes).
Clark Chapman says the past few weeks
have been "educational for the asteroid impact community," and he
refers to 2004 MN4 as the "most significant event, by far, in
decades."
So, take note: On Friday, April 13, 2029, from dark-sky sites
throughout Europe, 2004 MN4 will look like a
3rd-magnitude star. It will be moving a quarter of the way across the sky in
just an hour, its motion among the stars clearly evident.
And maybe, just maybe, you'll
see an asteroid die.
See the January 2005 issue of Biblical
Astronomy for the previous article on this asteroid.
MONSTER
EXPLOSION IN SPACE
The following article by Robert
Naeye was released by the Sky & Telescope website on February 18, 2005.
The Brightest Blast
On
December 27, 2004, more than a dozen spacecraft recorded the
brightest event from outside the solar system ever observed in the history of
astronomy. The spacecraft, which included Earth-orbiting satellites as well as
interplanetary probes such as Cassini, Mars Odyssey, and Ulysses, picked up a
powerful burst of gamma rays and X-rays from one of the most exotic beasts in
the galactic zoo: a magnetar. These bizarre objects are neutron stars
possessing magnetic fields a million billion times more powerful than Earth's
field, or some 1,000 times greater that those of normal neutron stars.
The "superflare,"
from a magnetar named SGR 180620, irradiated Earth with more total energy than a
powerful solar flare. Yet this object is an estimated 50,000 light-years away
in Sagittarius, on the far side of the Milky Way galaxy behind dense
interstellar clouds. "This is mind-boggling when you think about how far
away it is," says Kevin C. Hurley (University of California, Berkeley), one of the lead
investigators.
Bryan M. Gaensler
(Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), who conducted radio observations
of the superflare's afterglow, notes that only the Sun and perhaps a handful of
spectacular comets have doused Earth with more total energy than SGR 180620's superflare during
the two-tenths of a second that it peaked in intensity. During that flicker of
time it outshone the full Moon by a factor of two. The magnetar must have let
loose as much energy as the Sun generates in 250,000 years, assuming that the
distance estimate is accurate.
The burst was so powerful that
some of its gamma rays and X-rays reflected off the Moon (a very poor mirror)
and were detected by the Russian Helicon-Coronas-F satellite. Amateur radio
solar observers with the American Association of Variable Star Observers easily
detected the superflare's ionizing effects on Earth's upper atmosphere, even
though the radiation smacked into our planet's daylight hemisphere and thus had
to compete with the Sun.
The superflare has generated
intense observational and theoretical research around the world, as the
astronomical community has been forced to confront the question of how such a
tiny object, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) across, could unleash such
unmitigated fury.
Although the details remain
shrouded in mystery, the energy almost certainly resulted from SGR 180620 shedding part of its
extraordinary magnetic field. Magnetars, in fact, have the strongest magnetic
fields in the universe. Four magnetars, including this one, are known as soft
gamma repeaters, or SGRs, because they occasionally release powerful flares
of low-energy (soft) gamma rays. But the December 27th event was roughly 100
times more powerful than any previously observed SGR flare.
Magnetic field lines weaving
through the star probably flex its solid crust and heat its interior, leading
to stress that is occasionally relieved in sudden "starquakes." Such
an event allows the magnetic field to jerk pieces of the crust around and
rearrange itself to a lower-energy state. This rearrangement, which is a vastly
scaled-up version of a solar flare (a "reconnection event" in the
magnetic field), releases a huge amount of magnetic energy in the form of gamma
rays, electrons, and positrons (the antimatter counterpart of electrons). It's
this radiation that was responsible for the initial spike, which contained 99.7
percent of the superflare's total energy.
Electrons and positrons
confined by the magnetar's magnetic field annihilate one another over the next
several minutes, accounting for a fading tail of emission after the initial
0.2-second spike. This "trapped fireball" model was developed in the
mid-1990s by Robert C. Duncan (University of Texas, Austin) and
Christopher Thompson (Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics), who also
predicted the existence of magnetars in 1992.
The SGR superflare might partially
explain a long-standing mystery surrounding gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). These
mega-powerful explosions fall into two distinct classes: long events lasting
several seconds to several minutes, and short bursts, which last no more than
two seconds.
If one took SGR 180620 and moved it to
another galaxy, the superflare would mimic a short gamma-ray burst (GRB). Previous generations of
satellites would have detected the initial 0.2-second spike, but they would not
have been sensitive enough to detect the fading tail. Astronomers have long
suspected that that the short bursts are triggered by the merging of two
neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole. But as Duncan points out, "These
theories remain speculative. We've seen that SGRs can produce short GRBs."
NASA's recently launched Swift satellite could detect an event like SGR 180620's out to about 100
million light-years, which future observations should enable astronomers to
determine what fraction of short GRBs are caused by SGR superflares.
Thanks to the magnetar's great
distance, the superflare posed no threat to humanity or Earth's biosphere. The
International Space Station was on the opposite side of Earth when the flare
hit our planet, but even if the astronauts had faced the full fury of the
blast, they would have received a radiation dose less than a dental X-ray. An SGR superflare's pulse of
high-energy radiation could seriously damage a planet's atmosphere only if it
occurred within about 6 light-years, according to Adrian L. Melott (University of Kansas).
Numerous papers about the event
have already appeared on the preprint server Astro-ph. A
number of other papers, including theoretical research that might explain the
outburst, are currently being peer-reviewed prior to publication in
professional journals. Because of embargoes imposed by some of these journals,
astronomers have not been allowed to communicate their results to other
scientists, which has hindered progress in
understanding this event so far. More details about the superflare, including
amateur observations of the atmospheric disturbance, will appear in the May Sky
& Telescope.
An artist imagines SGR 1806-20, with
magnetic field lines and "hot spots" at the polar
regions. The X-ray oscillations viewed by Swift correspond to the
magnetar's revolution. NASA
Bob
Wadsworth will be speaking on celestial events that coincided with major Biblical
events throughout history on March 5,
2005
at the Beit Emet Congregation, 708 NE 78th
Street, Vancouver, Washington.
Shabbat services start at 4 pm. For directions and other info call 360-910-6621.
