Whoa. That’s some freaky stuff, hauntingly beautiful indeed. And supposedly it’s no longer there, having gone away 6000 years ago or whatever?
It’s only 6000 light years away. That’s only like a second in galactic terms and it should still be there, however, it’s believed a supernova has occurred that basically blasted the dust away.
Images taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope uncovered a cloud of hot dust in the vicinity of the Pillars of Creation that Nicolas Flagey accounted to be a shock wave produced by a supernova.[10] The appearance of the cloud suggests the supernova shockwave would have destroyed the Pillars of Creation 6,000 years ago. Given the distance of roughly 7,000 light-years to the Pillars of Creation, this would mean that they have actually already been destroyed, but because light travels at a finite speed, this destruction should be visible from Earth in about 1,000 years.[11] However, this interpretation of the hot dust has been disputed by an astronomer uninvolved in the Spitzer observations, who argues that a supernova should have resulted in stronger radio and x-ray radiation than has been observed, and that winds from massive stars could instead have heated the dust. If this is the case, the Pillars of Creation will undergo a more gradual erosion.[12]
Space is weird. Cool, fascinating, vast, but weird. Like quantum physics.
Last night was a rare combination of no clouds, excellent transparency, and above average seeing. I brought my telescope to a bortle 4 spot about 35 minutes away. Had a nice time. M31 had a visible core and I could finally appreciate its size. Double clusters and star clusters had many more visible stars. Of course with a 130mm reflector, galaxies and nebula are just faint grey smudges seen mainly with averted vision, but I saw more including the dumbbell nebula. Highlight was probably m81 and m82 or Bode’s nebula which are a pair of galaxies close to the Milky Way. Two galaxies in one view.
The Earth MOID for 2022 AP7 is only 0.0475 au, making it a PHA and likely the largest PHA found since 2014 based on absolute magnitude. 2022 AP7 is likely to be in the top 5% of the largest PHAs known. 2022 AP7 was relatively faint at discovery being 20.8 mag, but because it was relatively far from Earth at about 1.9 au and distant from the Sun around 1.4 au. It is a fairly large object, likely being well over 1 km in size assuming a moderate albedo (1.0–2.3 km diameter for an albedo of 0.25–0.05, respectively).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac8cff
For those who are curious, I did the math and .0475 AU is 4,415,400.8 miles
Long March 5B has a decent liklihood of crashing into the continental United States! Tomorrow!
https://aerospace.org/reentries/cz-5b-rb-id-54217
https://twitter.com/AerospaceCorp?s=20&t=69HqBI4RtvUNQjLfChb58g
6PM UTC is 2PM EST. But as a random tumbling 20-ton object, the window is 6 hours long which could put it anywhere, including the continental US on an earlier or later orbit.
Imagine the reaction and news if it lands on NYC, though the odds of this are astronomically small.
Aw, geez, they litterally just updated it with the landing spot now moved to the Indian Ocean. Goes to show orbital speed I guess. Is it wrong to somewhat hope it comes back over the US? I mean, it almost certainly wouldn’t hurt anyone.
It could still hit Diego Garcia!
Apologies to the fine people of this forum, Diego Luna, and Andy Garcia…
Matt_W
5647
I thought you couldn’t do celebrities with those!
For all I know it just spit out something completely random. It didn’t throw an error message or ban me :)
So your best chance to be the first person in history killed by falling space debris, and the centre of an international incident, are the 7:45AM and 9:18AM EST orbital passes tomorrow morning. These are well within the window of probability, and closest in time and space, to the current predicted splashdown of 8:24AM.
If you go to this site, it should work for your location. Pass predictions for satellite CZ-5B R/B
Crashed into the Pacific.
Could be a replacement for some of the rare earth metals used in high tech manufacturing.
jpinard
5652
Wow, I sure hope this works out in an industrial capacity.
So, not in space, but space-adjacent. It’s pretty incredible that this has been sitting down there all this time. I presume there was a fairly extensive search for debris back in the late 80s, but finding things in the ocean is still a very inexact science.
I vividly remember when this happened (the disaster, not the recovery of the debris recently). It was quite the shock for sure.
Thank you for this post; I really relate to this: shooting the moon with an inexpensive backyard telescope was something really fun I did with my son a year or so ago; I think I may have gotten more out of it than he did, but hopefully was able to impart some small sense of wonder.
There really is nothing quite like making a direct observation. I remember my teachers in high school getting super excited over things like ‘look… some light gets through if you insert a third polarizing lens in between at 45 degrees’ or ‘this steel ball on a swivel moved a few fractions of a centimeter in a week’s time due to local gravitational attraction!’
I didn’t quite understand it at the time… but I saw how excited they were, and this made me want to learn more.
In college the observations grew more fantastic, like a giant Foucault pendulum hanging from the ceiling of the science building, or the changing colors of thin section crystals as they were slowly rotated in a darkened lab. Again, I didn’t understand then, but over time I have started to grasp a little.
