Stargazing: Is it the time again for a meteoroid to hit Earth?

According to NASA’s Asteroid Fast Facts page, a lot of space material lands on Earth every year. From the NASA page:

“Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles.

“About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface.

Every 2,000 years or so, a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth and causes significant damage to the area.”

When is the next one coming? No one knows. But NASA and other organizations worldwide constantly watch out for possible impactors from space. Even so, some escape discovery until they hit. In 2013, a small asteroid, about the size of a six-story building, entered our atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russian. It exploded with a blast more powerful than the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The blast shattered glass in buildings all over the city and caused injuries to more than 1,200 people. It was so bright that scientists estimate it briefly outshone the sun. We had no warning of this event. No one saw it coming.

Many telescopes automatically search the night sky for incoming asteroids, for one with Earth in its sights. But scientists need your help finding them. You may be the one to spot the next one that threatens Earth.

An organization called Zooniverse currently has 108 projects where anyone, even you, can help scientists make new discoveries. I have written about Zooniverse before, but they have added quite a few new projects since then and more are added every year. You can find them at www.zooniverse.org.

The project to help find potentially dangerous asteroid is at www.zooniverse.org/projects/sandorkruk/hubble-asteroid-hunter. As with all the Zooniverse projects, you get a brief tutorial on what to look for and how to identify a target. Then you are presented with a series of photos. Using what you learned in the tutorial, you identify potential asteroid targets. Once identified, the project scientists analyze the photo to calculate the asteroid’s path to determine if Earth is in the way.

If saving the Earth from asteroid impacts isn’t your cup of tea, look through all of their projects. It’s likely one or several of the others will pique your interest.

Meteor Shower

The Geminid meteor shower peaks on the night of Friday and Saturday. While it can produce as many as 100 meteors per hour, a bright moon only three days past full will block out all but the brightest.

If you happen to be spending Christmas in Indonesia, Southeast Asia or Australia this year, step outside in the early afternoon. The moon passes between us and the sun, creating a solar eclipse. The moon is farther than average from us and won’t quite cover the entire disk of the sun. A ring, or annulus, of sunlight will encircle the dark moon, creating a relatively rare annular eclipse.

We won’t see any of this eclipse in Oklahoma. The next eclipse we see any part of in our state occurs on Oct. 14, 2023. But mark April 8, 2024, on your calendar. A total solar eclipse passes over southeast Oklahoma on that day, the best eclipse to hit our state in living memory.

Planet Visibility Report

December begins with Mars and Mercury in the pre-dawn sky. Jupiter, Venus and Saturn are grouped fairly close together low in the evening twilight. Over the course of the month, Venus gets higher, while the other two sink into invisibility on the twilight. Mercury also dives into the sun’s morning twilight glare, and by month’s end, only Venus in the evening sky and Mars in the morning sky remain visible. Full moon occurs on the 11th with new moon following on Christmas day.

Wayne Harris-Wyrick, children's book author, ghost hunter and astronomer. His email is wizardwayne@zoho.com.

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