Travelers In The Night

Comet C2/2015 V2 Johnson was discovered by my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Jess Johnson on November 3, 2015. It travels on a hyperbolic path around the Sun which is highly inclined to the plane where the planets and most of the asteroids travel. Jess's comet's path takes it from deep space into the inner solar system slightly further from the Sun than the planet Mars. Although it will not get closer to the Earth than about 75 million miles it may out gas enough material to make it visible to the naked eye. Observers in the northern hemisphere will have their best chance to view Comet Johnson in April and May of 2017 while those south of the equator will be able to observe it until early 2018. Jess's Comet will come closest to the Sun in June of 2017 and then be slung into deep space by the Sun's Gravity. In February of 2037 Jess's comet will be further than Pluto's average distance to the Sun and be invisible to human telescopes as it moves in the direction a star 417 light years away in the constellation of Eridanus. It will take more than 12 million years to get to the vicinity of that distant star.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Jacqueline Fazekas was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Aquarius with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon Arizona when she discovered a tiny asteroid which would impact the Earth in about 10 hours.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls was using the new hundred million pixel camera on our team's Schmidt telescope located on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona, when he discovered 2017 AG13. It passes near the Earth's orbit twice a year on its own 345 day path around the Sun. When Carson spotted it, 9 lunar distances from him it was heading in our direction at about nine and a half miles per second. Three days later it came to less than two times the distance the Moon's distance from us. Carson's new space rock, 2017 AG13's orbit, can bring it to less than 2,000 miles from the surface of our planet. It will not come near the Earth again until 2091 and will not strike the Earth in the foreseeable future. 2017 AG13 is slightly larger than the small asteroid which exploded over Chelyabinsk Russia, creating a sonic boom that injured nearly 1,500 people in February of 2013. If it had been on an impact trajectory, Carson's early discovery, would have given humans the time to calculate where it would hit and thus be able to put out a warning for people in the affected area to stay away from doors and windows. Less than three weeks later Carson was using the same equipment when he discovered another small space rock, 2017 BH30, which came to a bit more than an Earth's circumference from our home planet.

In a recent paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, a philosopher Dr. Vojin Rakić (voyin rack itch) reviews some 50 or so proposed solutions to Fermi’s paradox, including, that human life is so exceptional that it happened only once in the universe, that perhaps other civilizations destroy themselves like we are trying to do, civilizations broadcast radio and TV signals only for a relatively brief period of time, alien intelligent life maybe incomprehensible to our species, and that maybe the energy requirements and distances in the Milky way are too great allow us to discover others of our kind and many more ideas. After sorting through all of these concepts, Dr. Rakić (rack itch) suggests that alien life might be unobservable to the senses evolution has given humans and/or perhaps alien beings live in part of the wider universe we don't know of or cannot yet detect and observe.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has published an extensive data based review, analysis, and summary of the Earth's Climate. 2016 was hotter than 2015 which was hotter than 2014. 2016 is the warmest year the Earth has been in the more than 180 years of record keeping. Overall in 2016 the whole Earth was 1.8 F above the 1951-1980 average. The Arctic in 2016 was 7.2F higher than it was the pre-industrial age.

Scientific results are consistent with the hypothesis that the dinosaur killing, K-T layer forming Chicxulub impactor came from well beyond Jupiter while the other 5 impactors in the past 541 million years as well as most meteorites found on Earth came from asteroids formed between Mars and Jupiter. All of this prompts us to marvel that we are here at all and puzzle over how to prepare for what the future might hold. In particular asteroid hunters should take seriously the possibility of an impactor from deep space with our number on it.

An example that a relatively large space rock can approach the Earth suddenly started with what appeared as a bright star moving across the images that I had just obtained with the Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona. It was about 100 times brighter than most of Earth approaching objects asteroid hunters discover. Over the next 64 hours it was tracked by 45 different observatories around the globe. This previously unknown space rock, now named 2017 AG5, is approximately 370 feet in diameter and can come closer than the Moon's distance to us.

4015 Wilson-Harrington (1979 VA) was discovered as a comet by Wilson and Harrington in 1949, lost to astronomers for 30 years, and rediscovered in 1979 as an asteroid named 1979 VA. In 1992 with more data it was determined that comet Wilson-Harrington and asteroid 1979 VA are the same object.

2016 was another record year for asteroid hunters during which we discovered 1,894 new Earth approaching objects. My team, the NASA funded, Catalina Sky Survey, led the pack with 931 Near Earth Asteroid discoveries.

Binary asteroids are important since they enable astronomers to study how objects interact in space and in some cases the data can even yield their sizes and shapes.