Podcaster: Dr. Al Grauer
Title: Travelers in the Night Eps. 303E & 304E: Dust Stories & Big Splash
Organization: Travelers in The Night
Link : Travelers in the Night ; @Nmcanopus
Description: Today’s two stories:
- Micrometeorites can be collected from a roof’s gutter! Jon Larsen collected many from Paris, Oslo & Berlin. & Dr. Matthew Genge of ICL studied the 0.3mm diameter rocks for a scientific paper.
- Dr. Galen R. Gisler and his team calculated what would happen if a large impactor hit our oceans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imZmoxex9hc However, if the impact happened in the middle of a large ocean it might not be as bad as you’d think.
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:
303E – Dust Stories
It is estimated that several hundred thousand pounds of left over particles from the formation of our solar system enters the Earth’s atmosphere every day with perhaps 10% of the of the total reaching the surface of our home planet. The individual grains of cosmic dust or micro-meteorites as they are also called range in size from the diameter of a human hair to twice the thickness of a dime.
Hundreds of beautiful and informative micro-metereotites were collected by Jon Larsen, a Norwegian JAZZ musician. Jon used a powerful magnet to discover 500 relatively large micro-meteorites from a sample of nearly 600 lbs of sediment from roof gutters in Paris, Oslo, and Berlin. His partner Dr. Matthew Genge of Imperial College in London and the rest of their team analyzed individual members of Jon’s sample and published the results of their effort in the Journal Geology. The largest micrometeorites in the Larsen sample, about a quarter of the thickness of a dime in diameter, came from dust particles which entered the Earth’s atmosphere at an amazing 7.5 miles per second. Check out the U-tube video of 62 of Jon Larsen’s micro-space rocks. They are beautiful and carry unique information about our solar system. By comparing Larsen’s modern cosmic dust particles with those from samples from rocks of various ages, scientists are re-constructing a geological history of our solar system.
You can start your own beautiful micrometeorite collection with a ZIP lock, a microscope, and a powerful magnet attached to the gutter downspout drainpipe from your roof.
304E – Big Splash
To discover what would happen if an asteroid were to strike a large body of water, Dr. Galen Gisler led a team of scientists who used high performance computing facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory to calculate and visualize a 3-D model of an asteroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere over one of the world’s oceans. These efforts won them the Best Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase award at Supercomputing 2016. Reality is that what happens depends upon the mass, size, speed, angle of approach, and composition of the impacting object. Galen’s group of scientists documented the hunch that since an asteroid strikes the water at a single point, it only effects the immediate region around the impact point, whereas to create a tsunami, you need something like an under water landslide which disturbs an entire water column from the ocean floor to the surface.
Impacting stony asteroids less than the size of a football field are likely to explode in the atmosphere. One several hundred yards in diameter is likely to reach the surface making a splash that would send up billions of tons of water into the atmosphere and create waves 1,200 feet high which would quickly dissipate and are no threat to land many miles away. Water is a powerful green house gas when blown into stratosphere could remain for months or years and would have a significant effect on weather and climate. An impact near the coast would be an entirely different situation and would be very dangerous to nearby human populations.
365 Days of Astronomy
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As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity