Hey Everyone!
Its Mike Chen here’s some really interesting things going on right now that you should
know about so lets get to it.
First...you may not know it, but today, right now, there is a massive astroid nearly 3 miles
wide that is making a close encounter with earth and According to NASA, this is the closest
an asteroid of this size has come since it first began tracking near-Earth objects.
Its so close you can even see it with binoculars and the best time to see it is late evening.
so make sure to take a look at florence, yes it has a name.
The giant space rock will pass 4.4 million miles from earth, about 18 times the distance
between earrh and the sun.
It isnt the closest a NEO or near earth object has passed by our planet but it is by far
the largest and if it would have hit earth then...well lets just say, you wont have to
worry about going to work on monday.
The asteroid, florence is named after florence nightinggale and was first discovered in 1981
by Schelte J Bus at the Siding Spring observatory in Australia.
It orbits the sun every 859 days and wont come this close tous again for about another
500 years so unless we all become robots in the near future, this will be the last look
at this astroid for us.
And speaking of asrroids possibly hitting and ending all life on earth.
You know we do living in a universe where random space objects are just flying around
every which way, so the chances that a big one will eventually hit us is probbaly pretty
good.
This could happen become of some random astroid or when a large star could come close to the
sun and nudge some comets out of orbit and send it crashing into earth.
And according to Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy that very well
may happen because there are about a couple of dozen stars that will creep very close
to the sun and possibly send some comets our way.
But the good thing is, it most likly wont happen for over a million years.
Anyway like i mentioned Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy usinbg
data from the Gaia Space Telescope predicts that within any one million year period between
490 and 600 stars will come within 16.3 light-years of us.
That may still seem pretty far but in the grandness of space that can still be close
enough for their gravity to pull on objects in our solar system.
And what scientits are scared of is the disturbance of the oort cloud which is basically an extended
shell of icy objects that exist in the outermost reaches of the solar system.
And there will be approximatly 19-24 stars that are expected to get as close as 3.26
light year and may drastically disturb the object floating in space and send one of them
to us.
The closest is a dwarf star called Gliese 710 that could crash through the cloud itself,
but again that wont happen for at least another 1 million years.
Finally accoridng to popular science and basically every science publication out there.
Last saturaday Astronomers hunting for signs of intelligent alien life in the universe
have recorded 15 mysterious radio signals coming from a dwarf galaxy three billion light
years away.
And ive talked about FRBs before, they are fast radio bursts and are short pulses of
radio emission, just milliseconds long, believed to be coming from rapidly spinning neutron
stars or black holes in distant galaxies or from powerful spaceships from alien civilizations.
And a particular FRB named FRB 121102, is really interesting because its well its repeating
and thats something scientists cannot explain.
And then last week, researchers from the breakthrogh and listen project which was a project set
up by Stephen hawking and russian billianare Yuri Milner to basically find aliens.
Found new activitly from FRB 121102 and acoordint to Emily Petroff, a post-doctoral researcher
at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.
"The repeating FRB source is an anomaly in the population right now; it's the only one
of its kind," "We're trying hard to find more (either by checking to see if other FRBs repeat,
or trying to find more FRBs and monitor them)," Petroff wrote in an email.
"Keep in mind that the population is still really small.
Only 30 FRB sources have been found, from 29 of those we've only seen one burst, from
one of them we've seen over 200!"
Basically to see 15 burst from one source in a short amount of time is pretty exciting
because it has never happened before.
And A press release put out by the Breakthrough Listen organization, which funded and organized
the project says; “Possible explanations for FRBs range from outbursts from rotating
neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields, to more speculative ideas that they
are directed energy sources used by extraterrestrial civilizations to power spacecraft.”