Anybody see any meteors last night? This morning during the peak of the Perseid shower a huge boom went off near our home. How I wished it had been a meteorite, but of course it was only a thunderbolt.Â Rain fell all night.
Chris Peterson, who operates the ironically named Cloudbait Observatory, in Guffey, Colorado, has been tracking the Perseids since August 7 with an all-sky camera. His composite photo shows a total of 88 meteors through August 11. The curved trail at lower right is Jupiter. According to the most recent data from the International Meteor Organization (IMO), the shower peaked around 3:30 p.m. Central time yesterday August 12. While afternoon for U.S. observers, that was prime viewing time for sky watchers living in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The hourly rate, which assumes excellent conditions and the radiant near the zenith, shot up to a healthy 82 Perseids at that time. For U.S. observers, the number decreased only a little to 76 per hour during the wee hours this morning. Ardent meteor watchers across the world contributed observations of 11,166 Perseids to arrive at those figures. With no moon, many faint meteors were visible, and the shower tossed fortunate sky watchers occasional brilliant fireballs with bright “smoke trails” as well. For more details, please go to the IMO’s Quick Look page.
So what do raisins and Saturn’s moon Titan have in common? Wrinkles of course! Turns out Titan’s mountains, which rise about a thousand feet above the surface, were likely formed as the moon shrunk. Just as grapes dry and shrink to become raisins, Titan is shrinking as it cools, causing its surface to crumple into chains of icy mountains. The cooling starting not long after Titan formed and continues to this day.
Heat was first generated over 4 billion years ago from the gravitational attraction of the materials that gathered together to form Titan. That heat, as well as heat released from the decay of radioactive materials, leaks out into space, cooling the moon.Â As this happens, parts of Titan’s denser subsurface ocean freezes and the crust thickens and shrivels. “Titan is the only icy body we know of in the solar system that behaves like this,” said Giuseppe Mitri, the lead author of the paper and a Cassini radar associate based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Most of the bumpy topography in the outer solar system’s icy moons was formed by expansion of their crusts.
Scientists came to their conclusion about the shrinking moon by modeling various mixes of rocks, ice and underground water sources based on information sent by the Cassini probe until they succeeded in reproducing the appearance and locations of Titan’s hilly wrinkles. Not only is Titan the only moon in the solar system with a significant atmosphere and rivers of liquid hydrocarbons flowing across its bitterly cold surface, but it now may harbor a hidden ocean of water still warm from the moon’s formation. The closer we look at these little worlds on the fringe, the curiouser and curiouser they become.
The International Space Station (ISS) is still making excellent passes in the morning sky. If you’d like to see the brightest thing in the night sky after the moon and Venus, here are viewing times for the Duluth region. For times for your town, please click HERE. The ISS travels from west to east and looks like a brilliant, moving star. All passes below occur in the northern sky except the last.
* Friday morning Aug. 14 at 3:48 and again at 5:22 a.m.
* Saturday Aug. 15 at 4:14 a.m.
* Sunday Aug. 16 at 4:40 a.m.
* Monday Aug. 17 at 3:34 and 5:07 a.m.
* Tuesday Aug. 18 at 4 a.m. and 5:34 a.m. The second pass will be especially brilliant as the ISS cuts straight across the top of the sky moving northwest to southeast.