Is the distance between Earth and its moon increasing?

Lest I be accused of focusing too much attention on the swine flu, I thought I'd share this little tidbit that I pulled off of Stardate late last week:

Just like a spinning ice skater whose rotation slows as he extends his arms, the Earth-Moon distance is lengthening because Earth is spinning slower each day. The Moon's gravitational influence is slowing Earth's rate of rotation down by one and a half thousandths of a second every 100 years. The loss of rotational energy -- angular momentum, for the physicists in the crowd -- is necessarily matched by an increase in the Moon's angular momentum, which results in a larger orbit for the Moon.

Currently, the Moon moves less than two inches a year farther away from Earth -- a tiny amount, but easily measurable with modern laser-ranging devices.

If this rate of slowing were to remain constant, we could expect the Earth to stop spinning in 2.1 trillion years. That's a pretty long time, considering the upper range of estimates for the age of the universe are about 20 billion years.

At the end of that 21 billion years, the moon would be 66.4 million miles farther away from the Earth than it is today (240,000 miles). This would put it about 2/3 of the the way to the sun, and would make it farther from Earth than both Mars and Venus for much of the year.

This all, of course, assumes that the forces acting on the moon and Earth would remain constant...which they obviously would not.

The Hand of God?

This telescopic photo is (justifiably) generating some Internet buzz:From Stardate:

'Fingers' of hot gas around a dead star are passing energy to a distant gas cloud in this X-ray image from the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The entire complex is powered by a neutron star -- the corpse of an exploded star. The neutron star, known by its catalog number, PSR B1509-58, is only a few miles in diameter, but several times as massive as the Sun. The neutron star is embedded in the bright blue knot at center, but is far too small to see. It spins rapidly and generates a titanic magnetic field. These processes energize wisps of gas, forming the hand-like structure around the gas. Some of the energy flows into the more-distant gas cloud, making it glow in X-rays as well. In this image, blue represents the most powerful X-rays, while red and orange are less powerful. The structure is about 17,000 light-years away, and spans 150 light-years.

The result of this is a gigantic blue celestial "hand" reaching up towards a beautiful red ball of glowing gas. Awesome.

Halftime stargazing

I ran out at halftime of the game for some snacks and happened to look up. It's a clear night, so there's a great view of the stars. If you happened to look at the moon tonight, there's a very bright star just above and to the left of it. That "star" is actually Saturn. And really stands out since the light from the nearly-full moon washes out a lot of the dimmer stars around it.

Galaxy Zoo

I found this on Bad Astronomy and thought it was pretty cool:

A website called Galaxy Zoo allows users to classify galaxies. Visitors to the site are shown images of galaxies from deep space captured by a robotic telescope. By answering a series of questions, visitors are able to help the scientists who run the site classify these galaxies based on their characteristics. It's easy, fun, and many of the galaxy images are absolutely stunning. It's a great way for "ordinary folks" like most of us to use real world data participate in real world science.

Their goal is to classify 1,000,000 galaxies by Sunday, so I'm sure they could use all the help they can get. But I should warn you...it's surprisingly addictive.

How fast is the Earth moving through space?

From Stardate:

To begin with, Earth is rotating on its axis at the familiar rate of one revolution per day. For those of us living at Earth's midlatitudes -- including the United States, Europe, and Japan -- the rate is almost a thousand miles an hour. The rate is higher at the equator and lower at the poles. In addition to this daily rotation, Earth orbits the Sun at an average speed of 67,000 mph, or 18.5 miles a second.

Perhaps that seems a bit sluggish -- after all, Mars Pathfinder journeyed to Mars at nearly 75,000 miles per hour. Buckle your seat belts, friends. The Sun, Earth, and the entire solar system also are in motion, orbiting the center of the Milky Way at a blazing 140 miles a second. Even at this great speed, though, our planetary neighborhood still takes about 200 million years to make one complete orbit -- a testament to the vast size of our home galaxy.

Dizzy yet? Well hold on. The Milky Way itself is moving through the vastness of intergalactic space. Our galaxy belongs to a cluster of nearby galaxies, the Local Group, and together we are easing toward the center of our cluster at a leisurely 25 miles a second.

If all this isn't enough to make you feel you deserve an intergalactic speeding ticket, consider that we, along with our cousins in the Local Group, are hurtling at a truly astonishing 375 miles a second toward the Virgo Cluster, an enormous collection of galaxies some 45 million light-years away.

Asteroids and Such

Early this morning, a piece of rock 35 meters wide passed within 72,000 km of Earth. In the sense of space, that's a pretty close miss (about 1/5 the distance to the moon). Sky and Telescope has a short post about this even, as does Spaceweather. Bad Astronomy also has a post about it, but you won't be able to access it from a school computer (it's one of those dreaded blog-things...) It's important to note that this asteroid never posed a threat to Earth, even though it was only discovered a couple of days ago.

If you're tired of sleeping at night and want to give yourself something to worry about, scroll down on the Spaceweather site. You'll see that astronomers are currently tracking 1033 PHA's (potentially hazardous asteroids). These are large asteroids that have the potential of intersecting Earth's orbit at some point in the future.

WOOHOO!!!

After a long day full of clouds and wind, I expected to miss out on the chance to see Comet Lulin for another night. But since the good ol' Kansas weather is always changing, about an hour ago I decided to poke my head out and check to see how cold it was getting. Lo and behold, the clouds had blown away. So I quickly grabbed my binoculars and the telescope that I borrowed from the EMS science department, and set up shop on the back deck.

I wasn't sure how much luck I'd have, since the sky's not incredibly dark in the middle of town, but I thought I'd give it a try. As a warm-up, I pointed the scope towards Saturn...and was rewarded with a beautiful image of this creamy-yellow sphere encircled by a set of gorgeous rings. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, though since Saturn's ring's are edge-on towards Earth. But I guess this only happens every 29 years or so, so it's kind of a big deal.

Anyways, after doing a victory dance, warming myself up a little (it's cold and windy this evening) and chasing my dog around the yard,* I repositioned the scope and started searching for Lulin. I was surprised at how quickly I was able to find it...about 3/4 of the way between Saturn and Regulus, right where it was supposed to be.

*She had managed to get ahold of my glasses, and I'm pretty much blind without them. Sort of like that girl on Scoobie Doo. So if you can imagine Mr. Magette, in a heavy coat and house slippers, blindly chasing his dog around in the dark of his back yard, you'll get the picture. It's funnier now than it was at the time. Oh, and as an insult, she waited until I almost caught her and then dropped them right in front of me. Just in time for my foot to come down on them. Ah...the satisfying crunch of a pair of eyeglasses underfoot...

Anyways, the view of Comet Lulin from my back deck in the middle of town with amateur equipment and skills wasn't necessarily beautiful like these images. But it was still pretty darn cool. Just a fuzzy green little smudge-ball making its way across the sky.

Awesome...tomorrow night I'll try getting out of town where it's dark.

Not Tonight

Man, I was fired up. Tonight was going to be the night. I was going to put my kid to bed, grab my binoculars, and head out to a dark spot in the country. Tonight was the night that I was going to catch a glimpse of Comet Lulin.

But, alas, it wasn't meant to be...I'm not going to make it out tonight. But I will give you a little bit of stargazing advice to tide you over. If you go outside after dark, and look up in the sky to the west, that really bright "star" is actually Venus, our closest relative in the solar system. It's the really bright one...you can't miss it.

Comet Lulin

For those of you who are interested, Comet Lulin will be traveling across the eastern sky for the next couple of weeks. It looks like you'll need dark skies and good eyes to see it, but if you have binoculars you should be able to even make out the tail. Stardate has more information.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on The Daily Show

A great segment from Wednesday night's The Daily Show featuring astrophysicist Neil deGrase Tyson. Topics include the "demotion" of Pluto from planet status and a killer asteroid that's headed towards Earth. Good stuff from a great science guy.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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