Podcaster: Dr. Al Grauer
Title: Travelers in the Night Eps. 531 & 532: Alex’s Catch & Teddy’s Debut
Organization: Travelers in The Night
Link : Travelers in the Night ; @Nmcanopus
Description: Today’s 2 topics:
- Alex Gibbs discovered 8 new celestial visitors with the 60 inch telescope, including 2019 CR4 & 2019 CD5.
- Teddy Pruyne & Richard Kowalski discovered six new Earth Approaching Objects, including 2019 CL5.
Bio: Dr. Al Grauer is currently an observing member of the Catalina Sky Survey Team at the University of Arizona. This group has discovered nearly half of the Earth approaching objects known to exist. He received a PhD in Physics in 1971 and has been an observational Astronomer for 43 years. He retired as a University Professor after 39 years of interacting with students. He has conducted research projects using telescopes in Arizona, Chile, Australia, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Georgia with funding from NSF and NASA.
He is noted as Co-discoverer of comet P/2010 TO20 Linear-Grauer, Discoverer of comet C/2009 U5 Grauer and has asteroid 18871 Grauer named for him.
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Transcript:
531-Alex’s Catch
On a cold windy night, with clouds frustrating his search, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Alex Gibbs discovered 8 new celestial visitors while observing with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona.
Seven of Alex’s discoveries come to less than 1.3 times our distance from the Sun and are classified as Near-Earth Objects while the other one is a bit more distant and is classified as a Mars Crossing Asteroid. One of them, the 56 foot diameter, 2019 CR4 orbits the Sun in only 239 days on a path that goes from near Mercury to a bit further from the Sun than we are. The largest of the group of seven is the 420 foot diameter, 2019 CD5. If it were a bit larger, it would be classified as Potentially Hazardous since its impact would devastate a region on the Earth’s surface.
According to the Purdue University and Imperial College of London’s Impact Calculator one the size of 2019 CD5 strikes the Earth every 6500 years so , releases the energy of 25 megatons of TNT, and would create a crater 1300 feet in diameter and 283 feet deep in sedimentary rock. If you were located 10 miles from such an impact it would feel like a Richter Scale 4.5 magnitude Earth Quake. Fortunately on its current path 2019 CD5 never comes closer than about ten times the Moon’s distance from us.
532-Teddy’s Debut
My new Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne received a degree in astronomy from the University of Hawaii. He is learning asteroid hunting by being mentored by my teammate Richard Kowalski. On a recent training night with Teddy at the controls of our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona, this duo discovered six new Earth Approaching Objects, an inner main belt asteroid, and rediscovered an inner main belt asteroid which had been lost. Two other objects Teddy discovered that night were subsequently lost due to bad weather and the resulting lack of follow up observations.
Three days before Teddy spotted it streaking through the constellation of Virgo, a 30 foot diameter space rock, now known as 2019 CL5, had passed less than two Earth Moon distances from both our Earth and Moon. It is likely that a number of such small space rocks pass through our neighborhood every month and are undetected by humans. Once every 7 or 8 years a small object like 2019 CL5 enters our atmosphere and bursts into a cloud of fragments at 93,000 feet.
If you are lucky enough to witness such an impact you would be treated to a spectacular light show. If enough observers were to report such a spectacular fireball meteor to the the American Meteor Society, scientists could calculate its path through the atmosphere and perhaps identify places for meteorite hunters to discover fragments of it on the ground.
For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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