Lights Over Lapland is excited to announce that we now have TWO aurora webcams covering nearly a 200° view of Abisko National Park in Sweden! Watch the auroras dance live, all season long here. | | |
GEOMAGNETIC STORM PREDICTED: NOAA forecasters say there is a 45% chance of G1-class geomagnetic storms on Jan. 13th when a co-rotating interaction region (CIR) hits Earth's magnetic field. CIRs are transition zones between slow- and fast-moving solar wind streams. They contain shock-like density gradients and enhanced magnetic fields that can do a good job sparking polar auroras. Free: Aurora Alerts.
WILD ACTIVITY IN BLUE COMET PANSTARRS: Located far beyond the orbit of Mars, Comet PanSTARRS (C/2016 R2) is gliding through a cold and distant region of interplanetary space where things ordinarily change slowly, if at all. But PanSTARRS is no ordinary comet. On Jan. 10th, Austrian astrophotographer Michael Jäger recorded dramatic changes in only two hours:
Jäger is a veteran observer of comets, and he says he has never seen one quite like this. "Over the years, I have photographed 850 comets. But there was no other comet that changed its appearance so quickly at such great distances from the sun. I remember a few comets like 2015 Comet Lovejoy with significant changes from day to day, but they were much closer to the sun [where hot sunlight could drive activity]," says Jäger.
Only a few days ago, Comet PanSTARRS looked substantially different. Jäger took this color photo on Jan. 6th:
Since November 2017, Comet PanSTARRS has changed its appearance almost every time astronomers look at it. Images show jets waving wildly around the comet's core and clouds of gas billowing through the comet's tail.
What's happening? Blue is the telltale clue. That's the color of ionized carbon monoxide (CO+) fluorescing in the the near-vacuum of interplanetary space.
Comet PanSTARRS has abundant stores of CO. Last month, astronomers K. Wierzchos and M. Womack of the University of South Florida used the Arizona Radio Observatory's 10-m Submillimeter Telescope at Mount Graham to detect as many as 4.7 x 1028 CO molecules emerging from the comet's core every second. "This comet appears to be very CO-rich," they wrote in International Astronomical Union telegram CBET 4464.
Carbon monoxide can make a comet behave strangely because it is extremely volatile. CO can sublimate (change suddenly from solid to gas) at temperatures as low as -248 C (25 K). Only a little bit of sunlight is required to turn deposits of frozen CO into wild jets and billowing clouds.
"The last notable comet with high CO was Comet Humason in 1962, so this is quite a rare sight," notes another veteran comet observer, Michael Mattiazzo of Australia. "It will be very interesting to watch Comet PanSTARRS as it makes its closest approach to the sun (2.6 AU) in May 2018." Stay tuned!
Realtime Comet Photo Gallery
GLOWING 3D PRINTED MOON GLOBE: Looking for an over-the-Moon Valentine's gift? Consider this: On Jan. 4, 2017, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus flew this 3D printed Moon globe to the stratosphere:
The surface of the sphere is an accurate topo-map of lunar terrain, tracing every major crater and mountain range. It is also a night light. A built-in USB-rechargeable battery provides up to 20 hours of romantic illumination.
A helium-filled space weather balloon lifted the globe to the stratosphere, reaching an altitude of 36.3 km (119,095 ft) above California's Sierra Nevada mountains. After the balloon exploded, as planned, the payload parachuted back to Earth. The Moon was still glowing when the student recovery team found it in the wilderness.
You can have one for $149.95. Each glowing orb comes with a greeting card showing the Moon in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space. Sales support the Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray ballooning program and hands-on STEM research.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All proceeds support hands-on STEM education
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
Every night, a network of
NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.
On Jan. 11, 2018, the network reported 10 fireballs.
(10 sporadics)
In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (
PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding
new ones all the time.
On January 11, 2018 there were 1872 potentially hazardous asteroids.
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Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
2017 YJ7 | 2018-Jan-07 | 11.9 LD | 5.7 | 20 |
2017 YK7 | 2018-Jan-07 | 10.6 LD | 10.7 | 43 |
2017 YX4 | 2018-Jan-08 | 15 LD | 7.3 | 66 |
2017 XT61 | 2018-Jan-08 | 11.3 LD | 10.8 | 83 |
2004 FH | 2018-Jan-10 | 20 LD | 8.5 | 26 |
2017 YU3 | 2018-Jan-14 | 18.3 LD | 13.1 | 57 |
306383 | 2018-Jan-22 | 14.4 LD | 17.4 | 178 |
2018 AJ | 2018-Jan-23 | 4.6 LD | 5.5 | 41 |
2002 CB19 | 2018-Feb-02 | 10.5 LD | 15.6 | 36 |
276033 | 2018-Feb-04 | 11 LD | 34 | 646 |
2015 BN509 | 2018-Feb-09 | 12.9 LD | 17.7 | 257 |
1991 VG | 2018-Feb-11 | 18.4 LD | 2.1 | 7 |
2014 WQ202 | 2018-Feb-11 | 15.1 LD | 19.8 | 62 |
2016 CO246 | 2018-Feb-22 | 15.3 LD | 5.4 | 21 |
2017 DR109 | 2018-Feb-24 | 3.7 LD | 7.4 | 11 |
2016 FU12 | 2018-Feb-26 | 13.2 LD | 4.5 | 15 |
2014 EY24 | 2018-Feb-27 | 14.8 LD | 8 | 54 |
2015 BF511 | 2018-Feb-28 | 11.7 LD | 5.7 | 39 |
2003 EM1 | 2018-Mar-07 | 16.6 LD | 8 | 45 |
2017 VR12 | 2018-Mar-07 | 3.8 LD | 6.3 | 285 |
2015 DK200 | 2018-Mar-10 | 6.9 LD | 8 | 27 |
Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach. | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere |
Readers, thank you for your patience while we continue to develop this new section of Spaceweather.com. We've been working to streamline our data reduction, allowing us to post results from balloon flights much more rapidly, and we have developed a new data product, shown here:
This plot displays radiation measurements not only in the stratosphere, but also at aviation altitudes. Dose rates are expessed as multiples of sea level. For instance, we see that boarding a plane that flies at 25,000 feet exposes passengers to dose rates ~10x higher than sea level. At 40,000 feet, the multiplier is closer to 50x. These measurements are made by our usual cosmic ray payload as it passes through aviation altitudes en route to the stratosphere over California.
What is this all about? Approximately once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with radiation sensors that detect cosmic rays, a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. Cosmic rays can seed clouds, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. Furthermore, there are studies ( #1, #2, #3, #4) linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death in the general population. Our latest measurements show that cosmic rays are intensifying, with an increase of more than 13% since 2015:
Why are cosmic rays intensifying? The main reason is the sun. Solar storm clouds such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays when they pass by Earth. During Solar Maximum, CMEs are abundant and cosmic rays are held at bay. Now, however, the solar cycle is swinging toward Solar Minimum, allowing cosmic rays to return. Another reason could be the weakening of Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect us from deep-space radiation.
The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.
The data points in the graph above correspond to the peak of the Reneger-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Reneger and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today.
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