Podcaster: Dr. Al Grauer
Title: Travelers in the Night Eps. 63E & 64E: Will Space Aliens Discover Us By Our Pollution & Waking Up To No Satellites
Organization: Travelers in The Night
Link : Travelers in the Night ; @Nmcanopus
Description: Today’s 2 topics:
- When a distant planet passes in front of its star some of the star’s radiation goes through the planet’s atmosphere.
- What would your day be like if you woke up and there were no functioning artificial Earth satellites?
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:
63E: Will Space Aliens Discover Us By Our Pollution
When a distant planet passes in front of its star some of the star’s radiation goes through the planet’s atmosphere. The pattern of colors or wavelengths which are present and missing tells us what is in the planet’s atmosphere. The NASA Kepler Spacecraft has discovered more than a half dozen Earth like planets which pass between their star and the Earth.
Methane is a very simple molecule containing Carbon. On Earth 99% of methane is produced by living sources including everything from microbes to cows to humans. Dr. Mandy Joye’s of the University of Georgia and her colleagues’ research indicates that methane is the energy source for bacteria at the base of our oceans food chains. Recently, NASA has discovered that Mars is currently producing methane. We don’t know if it is from living or nonliving sources. Current research methods are focusing on how to distinguish methane produced from living creatures and that which comes from other processes.
As humans switch from high power broadcast radio and TV signals to fiber and satellites for communications the signals we radiate into space will decrease. Thus in the future space aliens will have less of a chance of detecting humans by listening for our transmissions. Unfortunately it appears that we will continue to pour polluting gases such as chlorofluorocarbons and methane into our atmosphere.
It appears likely that a way to discover pseudo intelligent life in the Universe is to search for pollution in their planet’s atmosphere.
64E: Waking Up To No Satellites
What would your day be like if you woke up and there were no functioning artificial Earth satellites? All of us have become used to finding our way with GPS satellites, watching satellite TV, obtaining up to date satellite weather information, and buying gas with a credit card which is processed with a satellite transaction.
A comet that comes closer to Earth than Comet Siding Spring’s near miss of Mars in October of 2014 would put many of our artificial satellites at risk. Fortunately we have not discovered any such Earth approaching comets. However, it is hard to assign a probability to such an event since comets routinely appear without warning.
On September 1, 1859 Richard Carrington saw two intense bright patches of light near some Sun spots. The flares that he saw on the Sun that day only lasted a few minutes during which time they released the energy of billions of nuclear weapons. By the next day the massive solar flares that he had witnessed produced events on the Earth. The northern lights were seen as far south as Cuba and Hawaii while the southern version was observed as far north as Santiago, Chile. The glow this event created in our atmosphere was so bright that people in the northeastern United States were able to read the newspaper by its light. The geomagnetic disturbances these mega solar flares produced caused telegraph equipment all over the world to fail. If the Carrington event occurred today, it would probably disable artificial satellites and disrupt power grids.
For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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