FIRE IN THE SKY: SETI Institute - Newly Discovered Meteor Shower Points To "POTENTIALLY HAZARDOUS COMET"!

This is an artist's illustration of a meteor shower on New Year’s Eve.  Danielle Futselaar/SETI Institute

March 6, 2016 - SPACE - While Earth can breathe easy for now, the SETI Institute and other astronomers are on the lookout for a "potentially hazardous" comet that may in the distant future pose a threat to our planet.

The search comes after a new meteor shower was spotted around New Year's Eve. It has never been seen before or tracked in radar observations. Calculations of the stream show the Earth is safe for the foreseeable future, but astronomers will be on the lookout for the parent body.

"In a way, the shower helped chase bad spirits away," said SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens in a statement. "Now we have an early warning that we should be looking for a potentially hazardous comet in that orbit."

The direction from which the new meteor shower approached. Credit: Peter Jenniskens/SETI Institute

The shower was seen in New Zealand with a network of video surveillance camera. It is called the Volantids after the constellation Volans (flying fish). As is traditional with meteor showers, it is named after the spot in the sky from which the meteors appear to emanate.

Meteor showers are in themselves regular and harmless events, but are being used in a new video surveillance project to find comets that could be dangerous to our planet. The project is a collaboration between Jenniskens and Jack Baggaley, a physics professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

"New Zealand, lying between 35 and 47 degrees southern latitude, has a long tradition of meteor studies," says Baggaley. "While radar observations in the past were efficient at observing sporadic meteors, the video cameras can see the meteor showers really well."

"In a way, the shower helped chase bad spirits away," said SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens in a statement.
"Now we have an early warning that we should be looking for a potentially hazardous comet in that orbit."

The network includes 32 video cameras at two stations on New Zealand's South Island, operated by amateur meteor astronomers Peter Aldous at Geraldine and Ian Crumpton at West Melton. The information is then sent to the SETI Institute, and Jenniskens performs calculations on the meteors' path. The parent body, astronomers added, may be hard to find because its orbit is so highly inclined to the Earth.

A study based on this data was submitted for publication in the Journal of the International Meteor Organization, showing 21 Volantid trajectories on Dec. 31 and two on Jan. 1. - Discovery News.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: The 14th Moon - NASA's Hubble Telescope Discovers New Neptune Moon!

July 16, 2013 - SPACE - An astronomer studying archived images of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has found a 14th moon orbiting the planet, NASA said on Monday.

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft failed to spot the tiny moon during its 1989 fly-pass of the giant gaseous planet.

Estimated to be about 12 miles (20 km) in diameter, the moon is located about 65,400 miles (105,251 km) from Neptune.

Astronomer Mark Showalter, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, was searching Hubble images for moons inside faint ring fragments circling Neptune when he decided to run his analysis program on a broader part of the sky.

“We had been processing the data for quite some time and it was on a whim that I said, ‘OK, let’s just look out further,” Showalter told Reuters.

“I changed my program so that instead of stopping just outside the ring system it processed the data all the way out, walked away from my computer and waited an hour while it did all the processing for me. When I came back, I looked at the image and there was this extra dot that wasn’t supposed to be there,” Showalter said.

Follow-up analysis of other archived Hubble images of Neptune verified the object was a moon. Showalter and colleagues are mulling over a name to propose to the International Astronomical Union, which has final say in the matter.

“We haven’t really gotten far with that. What I can say is that the name will be out of Roman and Greek mythology and it will have to do with characters who are related to Neptune, the god of the oceans,” Showalter said.

Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, was discovered in 1846, just days after the planet itself was found. Nereid, Neptune’s third largest moon was found in 1949.


WATCH: Neptune acquires a 14th moon thanks to closer study.

Images taken by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft unveiled the second largest moon, Proteus, and five smaller moons, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea and Larissa. Ground-based telescopes found Halimede, Laomedeia, Sao and Nestor in 2002. Sister moon Psamathe turned up a year later.

The newly found moon, designated S/2004 N 1, is located between Larissa and Proteus. It orbits Neptune in 23 hours. - Euro News.