Podcaster: Dr. Al Grauer
Title: Travelers in the Night Eps.781 & 782: Comet C.2023 V5 (Leonard) & Probing The Cosmic Web
Organization: Travelers in The Night
Link : Travelers in the Night ; @Nmcanopus
Description: Today’s two stories:
- My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Aquarius with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when he discovered his 19th comet. Turns out Greg’s new comet is a member of a family of comets orbiting the Sun like a string of cosmic pearls across the vast distances in our solar system.
- In the past two decades astronomers have discovered that galaxies are not randomly distributed in space but rather occur along filaments of mass with huge empty voids between them. How objects and structures in the early Universe became nearby clusters of galaxies and third generation stars like our Sun is an evolving picture we are beginning to understand.
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:
Ep. 781: Comet C.2023 V5
My Catalina Sky Survey teammate, Greg Leonard, was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Aquarius with our Schmidt telescope on Mount Bigelow, Arizona, when he discovered his 19th comet. Greg describes his discovery as being surrounded by a coma of gas five times the diameter of a star on the same image.
Follow-up observations over the next four days by 34 observatories around the world yielded a preliminary orbit and the name C2023 V5 Leonard. It likely has a frozen core a few miles in diameter. However, because of solar warming, at the time Greg discovered it, comet C2023 V5 Leonard appeared as a gas cloud approximately one-half the diameter of the moon in physical size.
Although the paths of most of the small objects orbiting the sun appear to be random, a small number fall into groups or families. In a research note of the American Astronomical Society by Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marquez, Greg’s new comet is suggested to be the fifth member of the Lillirth comet family. Evidence suggests that C1988 A1 Lillir and C1996 Q1 Tabor are the first-generation fragments from a sun-grazing comet splitting event that occurred in 945 BC.
It appears likely three or more comets, C2015 F3 Swan, C2019 Y1 Atlas, and C2023 V5 Leonard, are secondary fragments trailing behind the parent objects. Currently, the known members of the Lillir family of comets are strung out in similar orbits like a string of cosmic pearls across the vast distances in our solar system.
Ep. 782: Probing The Cosmic Web
In the past two decades, astronomers have discovered that galaxies are not randomly distributed in space, but rather occur along filaments of mass with huge empty voids between them. Amazingly, the James Webb Space Telescope allows astronomers to study objects as they existed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang in the kindergarten of the universe.
In a research project led by Fei-Hsuan Wang of the University of Arizona and published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists used JWST to image a 3 million light-year-long cosmic filament of mass containing at least 10 galaxies. Some 830 million years after the Big Bang, one of these ancient galaxies is observed to have a supermassive black hole called a quasar at its core. To obtain a more complete picture, data from the JWST was combined with the data from ALMA, the largest radio telescope in the world located in Chile’s high Atacama Desert.
The data from both of these facilities were used to measure the characteristics of 8 bright quasars which existed in the same era and have masses which range from 600 million to 2 billion times that of our sun. The significance of these ancient quasars in the early universe is that as they continued to grow in mass, the outflow of matter and energy from regions surrounding them influenced galaxy and star formation extending forward in time to our place in history. How these objects and structures in the early universe became clusters of galaxies and third generation stars like our sun is an evolving picture we are beginning to understand.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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