Podcaster: Dr. Al Grauer
Title: Travelers in the Night Eps. 153 & 154: One, Two Punch & Asteroid Diamonds
Organization: Travelers in The Night
Link : Travelers in the Night ; @Nmcanopus
Description: Today’s 2 topics:
- About 35 million years ago the Earth was impacted by two large asteroids creating the more than 50 mile diameter craters.
- Did you know that asteroids can bring diamonds to Earth and that asteroids sometimes create diamonds when they collide with our planet?
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:
153E: One, Two Punch
About 35 million years ago the Earth was impacted by two large asteroids creating the more than 50 mile diameter Popigai [pop a gay i] Crater in Russia and a similar crater in Chesapeake Bay in the USA. Analysis of fragments indicate that the impacting objects were not made of the same material. This finding has led scientists to speculate that there may be an astronomical process which changes conditions in the inner asteroid belt and causes the Earth’s orbit to change slightly. This combination could have triggered the ice age which caused the first significant ice sheet in Antarctica to form and led to the last major extinction event in the Earth’s history.
The Popigai Crater was created when a large asteroid crashed into the Tamyr [tim er] Peninsula in northern Siberia, Russia. This large impacting object was traveling at more than 10 miles per second. The force of impact melted thousands of cubic miles of rock spraying debris over a huge area.
The more than 50 mile diameter, one mile deep, Chesapeake Bay Crater was formed when 6 or 7 mile diameter object crashed into Earth creating a 15 story high tsunami which went inland to near the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The cooling of the Earth 35 million years ago is coincident with the impact of these two different types of asteroids one iron rich and the other iron poor. This suggests that they came from different regions in the solar system and may have been disturbed from their previous orbits by resonances in planetary orbits that can cause chaos in the solar system.
154E: Asteroid Diamonds
Did you know that asteroids can bring diamonds to Earth and that asteroids sometimes create diamonds when they collide with our planet?
The Sutter’s Mill meteorite fell to Earth April 22, 2012. Its fall was recorded by Doppler weather RADAR which indicated where fragments of it could be found. Two days later pieces of it were discovered by NASA Ames and SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens. The samples he collected have resulted in more than a dozen scientific papers. In one of them, NASA scientists report having found two microscopic diamonds, in this celestial messenger, which are large enough to suggest that they were formed in the interiors of objects which existed in our solar system long ago.
About 40 years ago, diamonds were discovered in the asteroid impact Popigai [pop a gay i] Crater in Siberia. Recently some Russian Scientists began to claim that this site may contain trillions of carats of industrial diamonds some of which may be twice as hard as ordinary diamonds. So far this deposit has not proven to have economic value since synthetic industrial quality diamonds for cutting tools have been made economically by humans since the 1950s. Most of the tiny diamonds from this asteroid impact are less than the thickness of two dimes in diameter. The heat and pressure during the impact event simply did not last long enough to create large clear stones which would have value in the jewelry market.
These two astronomical sources of diamonds remain an interesting target of scientific investigation.
For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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