Travelers in the Night Eps. 323 & 324: Big Splash & Newborn Planets

Dr. Al Grauer hosts. Dr. Albert D. Grauer ( @Nmcanopus ) is an
observational asteroid hunting astronomer. Dr. Grauer retired
from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2006.
travelersinthenight.org


From October 2024.


Today's 2 topics:


- To discover what would happen if an asteroid were to strike a
large body of water, Dr. Galen Gisler led a team of scientists
who used high performance computing facilities at Los Alamos
National Laboratory to calculate and visualize a 3-D model of an
asteroid entering the Earth's atmosphere over one of the world's
oceans. These efforts won them the Best Visualization and Data
Analytics Showcase award at Supercomputing 2016. Reality is that
what happens depends upon the mass, size, speed, angle of
approach, and composition of the impacting object. Galen's group
of scientists documented the hunch that since an asteroid strikes
the water at a single point, it only effects the immediate region
around the impact point, whereas to create a tsunami, you need
something like an under water landslide which disturbs an entire
water column from the ocean floor to the surface.


 


- The ALMA radio telescope located in the Atacama desert of
northern Chile is able to see the faint millimeter wave length
glow emitted by gas molecules and dust particles in the disk of
material surrounding the very young star named HD 163296. This
solar system in formation is located about 400 light years away
in the constellation of Sagittarius. HD 162396's age compared to
our Sun is like that of a 3 day old human baby compared to a 65
year old adult.


 


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