Calendar of Events

PUBLIC OBSERVING South Park—West

After the Band Concerts

Summer Schedule

Wednesday, July 8

9:00—10:30 PM

President: Rick Heschmeyer

rcjbm@sbcglobal.net

Treasurer: Dr. Steve Shawl Shawl@ku.edu

University Advisor:

Dr. Bruce Twarog btwarog@ku.edu

Webmaster: Gary Webber

gwebber@ku.edu

Observing Clubs Doug Fay

dfay@ku.edu

Report from the Officers: While the fireworks of the Fourth may not be as spectacular as the cos-mic explosion illustrated at left, they are certainly less dangerous and more en-tertaining. Our final try for post-Band-concert ob-serving takes place on Wed. July 8 in South Park, west of Mass. St. The musical program will be “Around the World in 60 Minutes”. We have been shut out every scheduled Wed. this summer, so the odds are in our favor. As al-ways, if you can help, please contact Rick so we can be sure that the ses-sions are appropriately

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Volume 35 Number 07 July 2009

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Sunspot Mystery Solved? 3

NASA Space Place 4

Betelgeuse Shrinking? 5

Life on Titan? (continued) 6

Betelgeuse (continued) 6

Herschel’s First Look 7

MW Particle Accelerator 8

SSS: Tunguska=Comet 9

Exotic Life Could Sprout From Titan Chemistry By Clare Moskowitz, Astrobiology Magazine

If life exists on Titan, it's anyone's guess what that life looks like.

Saturn's largest moon is not a good candidate for Earth-like life because it usually lacks liquid water on the surface. But one of Titan's most promising features is the presence of lakes filled with liquid hydrocarbons, or molecules made of hydrogen and carbon, such as methane and ethane. These lakes were recently spotted by the Cassini-Huygens mission, a NASA/European Space Agency/Italian Space Agency spacecraft currently in orbit around Sat-urn. Titan is now the only body in our solar system other than Earth known to have liquid on its surface.

A new study has found that, depending on their particular make-up and vol-ume, the lakes on Titan could be good hosts for a certain type of prebiotic-like chemistry that could lead to life. High-energy cosmic rays blast down on the lakes and could spark reactions that create more complex molecules.

"I found that the result is very dependent on the chemical composition of the lakes," says Tetsuya Tokano, a planetary scientist at the University of Co-

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About the Astronomy Associates of Lawrence

The club is open to all people interested in sharing their love for astronomy. Monthly meetings are typically on the second Fri-day of each month and often feature guest speakers, presentations by club members, and a chance to exchange amateur as-tronomy tips. Approximately the last Sunday of each month we have an open house at the Prairie Park Nature Center. Periodic

star parties are scheduled as well. For more information, please contact the club officers:our president, Rick Heschmeyer at rcjbm@sbcglobal.net, our webmaster, Gary Webber, at gwebber@ku.edu, or our faculty advisor, Prof. Bruce Twarog at

btwarog@ku.edu. Because of the flexibility of the schedule due to holidays and alternate events, it is always best to check the Web site for the exact Fridays and Sundays when events are scheduled. The information about AAL can be found at

http://www.ku.edu/~aal.

Copies of the Celestial Mechanic can also be found on the web at http://www.ku.edu/~aal/celestialmechanic

staffed if the weather is clear. This can be a challenge during the summer when many people head out of town on vacation. ALCON 2009, the 2009 national convention of the Astronomical League, takes place in New York City area. The official site is Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY and the dates of the convention are Aug. 8-9. However, ALCON area tours and events will take place from Aug. 2-6, and Aug. 9. For a detailed look at the extensive series of speakers and events, check out the web site: http://www.alcon2009.org/index.html.

If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, or input on how we can make the club better, please contact Rick (rcjbm@sbcglobal.net). Look forward to seeing everyone at the post-Band-Concert viewing, weather-permitting, on Wed. evening, July 8. Keep your fingers crossed!

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logne in Germany and author of a paper in the March 2009 issue of the journal Astrobiology detailing the study results. "If certain chemicals are missing, then the lake could freeze or dry out. But if the lake is composed of a mixture of ethane, methane and nitrogen, the lake can exist for many years and provide a medium for prebiotic-like chemistry."

Though Cassini RADAR images photographed a number of hydrocarbon lakes in the polar region of Titan, the spacecraft was unable to determine how deep the lakes are or what they're made of.

Based on what is known, Tokano used computer numerical models to analyze many possible sets of lake condi-tions to find which are most promising for prebiotic-like chemistry and possible development of alien life.

He found that the ability of Titan's lakes to harbor biochemistry depends not just on their composition, but on their size. If a lake is too shallow it might evaporate before any signifi-cant developments can take place. However, if a lake is too deep, it might have a bottom layer that doesn't mix well with upper layers, and important chemicals could be seques-tered away.

New Kinds of Alien Life

Much about Titan and the possibility of life there is still unknown. "If there is life on Titan it would be very different from that on Earth," Tokano says. "And we don't know if such life

is possible at all. It's just speculation."

Titan may be a good candidate for silicon-based life, if it exists, because the moon has the low temperatures,

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Mystery Of The Missing Sunspots Solved? ScienceDaily

The sun is in the pits of a century-class solar minimum, and sunspots have been puzzlingly scarce for more than two years. Now, for the first time, solar physicists might understand why.

At an American Astronomical Society press conference in Boulder, Colorado, researchers announced that a jet stream deep inside the sun is migrating slower than usual through the star's interior, giving rise to the current lack of sunspots. Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, used a technique called helioseismology to detect and track the jet stream down to depths of 7,000 km below the surface of the sun. The sun generates new jet streams near its poles every 11 years, they explained. The streams migrate slowly from the poles to the equator and when a jet stream reaches the critical latitude of 22 degrees, new-cycle sunspots begin to appear.

Howe and Hill found that the stream associated with the next solar cycle has moved sluggishly, taking three years to cover a 10 degree range in latitude compared to only two years for the previous solar cycle. The jet stream is now, finally, reaching the critical latitude, heralding a return of solar activity in the months and years ahead.

"It is exciting to see", says Hill, "that just as this sluggish stream reaches the usual active latitude of 22 de-grees, a year late, we finally begin to see new groups of sunspots emerging."

The current solar minimum has been so long and deep, it prompted some scientists to speculate that the sun might enter a long period with no sunspot activity at all, akin to the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century. This new result dispells those concerns. The sun's internal magnetic dynamo is still operating, and the sunspot cy-cle is not "broken."

Because it flows beneath the surface of the sun, the jet stream is not directly visible. Hill and Howe tracked its hidden motions via helioseismology. Shifting masses inside the sun send pressure waves rippling through the stellar interior. So-called "p modes" (p for pressure) bounce around the interior and cause the sun to ring like an enormous bell. By studying the vibrations of the sun's surface, it is possible to figure out what is happening inside. Similar techniques are used by geologists to map the interior of our planet.

In this case, researchers combined data from GONG and SOHO. GONG, short for "Global Oscillation Net-work Group," is an NSO-led network of telescopes that measures solar vibrations from various locations around Earth. SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Ob-servatory, makes similar measurements from space. "This is an important discovery," says Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "It shows how flows inside the sun are tied to the creation of sun-spots and how jet streams can affect the timing of the solar cycle."

There is, however, much more to learn. "We still don't understand exactly how jet streams trigger sunspot production," says Pesnell. "Nor do we fully understand how the jet streams themselves are generated."

To solve these mysteries, and others, NASA plans to launch the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) later this year. SDO is equipped with sophisticated helio-seismology sensors that will allow it to probe the solar interior better than ever before.

"The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on SDO will improve our understanding of these jet streams

and other internal flows by providing full disk images at ever-increasing depths in the sun," says Pesnell.

Continued tracking and study of solar jet streams could help researchers do something unprecedented--accurately predict the unfolding of future solar cycles.

A helioseismic map of the solar interior. Tilted red-yellow bands trace solar jet streams. Black contours denote sunspot activity. When the jet streams reach a critical latitude around 22 degrees, sunspot activity intensifies. (Credit: Image courtesy of National Solar Observatory)

The Cool Chemistry of Alien Life

Alien life on distant worlds. What would it be like? For millennia people could only wonder, but now NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope is producing some hard data. It turns out that life around certain kinds of stars would likely be very different from life as we know it. Using Spitzer, as-tronomers have discovered the organic chemical acetylene in the planet-forming discs surrounding 17 M-dwarf stars. It’s the first time any chemical has been detected around one of these small, cool stars. However, scientists are more in-trigued by what was not there: a chemical called hydrogen cyanide (HCN), an important building block for life as we know it. “The fact that we do not detect hydrogen cyanide around cool stars suggests that that prebiotic chemistry may unfold differently on planets orbiting cool stars,” says Ilaria Pascucci, lead scientist for the Spitzer observations and an astro-physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

That’s because HCN is the basic component for making adenine, one of the four information-carrying chemicals in DNA. All known life on Earth is based on DNA, but without adenine available, life in a dwarf-star solar system would have to make do without it. “You cannot make adenine in another way,” Pascucci explains. “You need hydrogen cyanide.”

M-dwarf and brown dwarf stars emit far less ultraviolet light than larger, hotter stars such as our sun. Pascucci thinks this difference could explain the lack of HCN around dwarf stars. For HCN to form, mole-cules of nitrogen must first be split into individual nitrogen atoms. But the triple bond holding molecular nitrogen together is very strong. High-energy ultraviolet photons can break this bond, but the lower-energy photons from M-dwarf stars cannot. “Other nitrogen-bearing molecules are going to be affected by this same chemistry,” Pascucci says, possibly including the precur-sors to amino acids and thus proteins. To search for HCN, Pascucci’s team looked at data from Spitzer, which ob-serves the universe at infrared wavelengths. Planet-forming discs around M-dwarf stars have very faint infrared emis-sions, but Spitzer is sensitive enough to detect them.

HCN’s distinctive 14-micron emission band was absent in the infrared spectra of the M-dwarf stars, but Spitzer did detect HCN in the spectra of 44 hotter, sun-like stars. Infrared astronomy will be a powerful tool for studying other prebiotic chemicals in planet-forming discs, says Pascucci, and the Spitzer Space Telescope is at the forefront of the field. Spitzer can’t yet draw us a picture of alien life forms, but it’s beginning to tell us what they could—and could not—be made of. “That’s pretty wonderful, too,” says Pascucci.

For news of other discoveries based on Spitzer data, visit www.spitzer.caltech.edu. Kids can learn Spitzer astronomy words and concepts by playing the Spitzer “Sign Here!” game at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/spitzer/signs.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Do alien planets around other stars have the right ingredients for a pre-biotic soup?

Red giant star Betelgeuse mysteriously shrinking The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has steadily shrunk over the past 15 years, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.

Long-term monitoring by UC Berkeley's Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) on the top of Mt. Wilson in Southern Cali-fornia shows that Betelgeuse (bet' el juz), which is so big that in our solar system it would reach to the orbit of Jupiter, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.

Since Betelgeuse's radius is about five astronomical units, or five times the radius of Earth's orbit, that means the star's radius has shrunk by a distance equal to the orbit of Venus.

"To see this change is very striking," said Charles Townes, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics who won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Phys-

ics for inventing the laser and the maser, a microwave laser. "We will be watching it carefully over the next few years to see if it will keep contracting or will go back up in size." Despite Betelgeuse's diminished size, Wishnow pointed out that its visible brightness, or magnitude, which is monitored regularly by members of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, has shown no significant dimming over the past 15 years.

The ISI has been focusing on Betelgeuse for more than 15 years in an attempt to learn more about these giant massive stars and to discern features on the star's surface, Wishnow said. He specu-lated that the measurements may be affected by giant convection cells on the star's surface that are like convection granules on the sun, but so large that they bulge out of the surface. Townes and former graduate student Ken Tatebe observed a bright spot on the surface of Betelgeuse in recent years, although at the moment, the star appears spherically symmetrical.

"But we do not know why the star is shrinking," Wishnow said. "Considering all that we know about galaxies and the distant uni-verse, there are still lots of things we don't know about stars, in-cluding what happens as red giants near the ends of their lives."

Betelgeuse was the first star ever to have its size measured, and even today is one of only a handful of stars that appears through the Hubble Space Telescope as a disk rather than a point of light. In1921, Francis G. Pease and Albert Michelson used optical inter-ferometry to estimate its diameter was equivalent to the orbit of Mars. Last year, new measurements of the distance to Betelgeuse raised it from 430 light years to 640, which increased the star's diameter from about 3.7 to about 5.5 AU.

"Since the 1921 measurement, its size has been re-measured by (Continued on page 6)

The three telescopes of the Infrared Spatial Interferometer lined up east-west on Mt. Wilson in Southern California. The telescopes are mounted in semi-trailers so that they can be moved. The building with the periscopes houses a laser which is transmitted to all three telescopes.

UC Berkeley physicist Charles Townes cleans one of the large mirrors of the Infrared Spatial Interfer-ometer. (Cristina Ryan 2008)

lack of oxygen, and lack of liquid water thought to be necessary for this kind of life.

Silicon-based life would use the element silicon to build its cells, rather than carbon as life on Earth does. Be-cause silicon is heavier than carbon and bonds differently with other elements, these types of cells would probably look and function differently than cells familiar to us. Instead of using water as a solvent, silicon-based life could use another substance. Some scientists have proposed that the hydrocarbon mixtures in Ti-tan's lakes could act as a solvent for exotic forms of life.

Mysterious Moon

Many questions remain about Titan's lakes, including what they might look like up close. "Some are as big as [Michigan's] Great Lakes," Tokano says. "I don't know the exact color, but a deep lake would be darker than a shallow lake, and perhaps the color is not blue."

He and other scientists would love more data to help solve these riddles. They have been pushing for a dedi-cated spacecraft to visit Titan and send back data from the lakes. So far, no firm plans exist, although NASA and ESA are studying a possible mission concept. "I hope that there will be future probes, but this may take 20 or 30 years," Tokano says. "I would like to know the depth of the lakes, and the exact chemical composi-tion. In principle, if we have a future mission to Titan, a probe which lands on the lake itself, it should be possi-ble."

Studying the chemistry of Titan's lakes could be significant not just in the search for life beyond Earth, but also in the quest to learn about the origin life on our own planet, Tokano says. Learning whether certain conditions on other worlds are conducive to prebiotic chemistry could help narrow down the possibilities, or exclude con-ditions that clearly couldn't lead to the carbon-based life we have on Earth. "If you compare the conditions of Earth and Titan, we can maybe find the difference in the evolution of prebiotic chemistry, and discover which conditions are necessary," Tokano says.

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many different interferometer systems over a range of wavelengths where the diameter measured varies by about 30 percent," Wishnow said. "At a given wavelength, however, the star has not varied in size much beyond the measure-ment uncertainties."

The measurements cannot be compared anyway, because the star's size depends on the wavelength of light used to measure it, Townes said. This is because the tenuous gas in the outer regions of the star emits light as well as absorbs it, which makes it difficult to determine the edge of the star.

The ISI that Townes and his colleagues first built in the early 1990s sidesteps these confounding emission and absorp-tion lines by observing in the mid-infrared with a narrow bandwidth that can be tuned between spectral lines. The ISI consists of three 5.4-foot (1.65-meter) diameter mirrors separated by distances that vary from 12 to 230 feet (4-70 me-ters), said Townes. Using a laser as a common frequency standard, the ISI interferometer combines signals from tele-scope pairs in order to determine path length differences between light that originates at the star's center and light that originates at the star's edge. The technique of stellar interferometry is highlighted in the June 2009 issue of Physics Today magazine.

"We observe around 11 microns, the mid-infrared, where this long wavelength penetrates the dust and the narrow bandwidth avoids any spectral lines, and so we see the star relatively undistorted," said Townes. "We have also had the good fortune to have an instrument that has operated in a very similar manner for some 15 years, providing a long and consistent series of measurements that no one else has. The first measurements showed a size quite close to Michelson's result, but over 15 years, it has decreased in size about 15 percent, changing smoothly, but faster as the years progressed."

Townes, who turns 94 in July, plans to continue monitoring Betelgeuse in hopes of finding a pattern in the changing diameter, and to improve the ISI's capabilities by adding a spectrometer to the interferometer.

"Whenever you look at things with more precision, you are going to find some surprises and uncover very fundamental and important new things," he said.

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Herschel’s first glimpse into space The Herschel Space Observatory sends back the first images to earth: the image quality is outstanding The Herschel Space Observatory, launched only a month ago, is still being commissioned, and the first images from its instruments were planned to arrive in a few weeks. But, when the spacecraft’s cryostat cover was opened on Sunday, 14 June, and the instruments were able to "see" the sky for the first time, ESA suggested using this opportunity to produce a very early image that could give a glimpse of things to come. The Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) was lucky enough to capture some images, indeed, that immediately demonstrated the superiority of Herschel, the largest infrared space tele-scope.

The images show the famous ‘whirlpool galaxy’, first observed by Charles Messier in 1773 who provided the designation Messier 51 (M51). This classic ex-ample of a spiral galaxy lies relatively nearby, about 37 million light-years away, in the constellation of Canes Venatici. The images were taken with the 3-band photometer of PACS, at wavelengths of 160 microns, 100 mi-crons, and 70 microns. These wavelengths are

about 200 times longer than those of the light we see with our eyes! The new, large telescope of Herschel allows us - for the first time - to capture sharp images in this very special light, which is ideally suited to discover and investigate regions where stars are being formed and to peer into the obscured cores of galaxies, which, like M51, often contain super-massive black holes. These images, produced from the very first test observation, lead scientists to conclude that the optical performance of Herschel and its large telescope is so far meeting their high expectations.

Fig. 1: Far-infrared colour image of the "Whirlpool Galaxy" M51. Red, green and blue colours in this image correspond to the 160 microns, 100 microns and 70 microns wavelength bands of the Herschel/PACS instrument. At these wavelengths we see the glowing light from clouds of dust and gas around and between the stars. These clouds provide the reservoir of raw materials for the ongoing star formation in this galaxy. Blue colours indicate re-gions of warm dust that are heated by nearby young stars, while the colder dust in other parts of M51 shows up in red. Image: ESA & The PACS Consortium

Fig. 2: Image comparison of an M51 image taken with the Spitzer Space Observatory and the same image taken with the recently launched Herschel Space Observatory. The obvious advantage of the larger size of the telescope is clearly reflected in the much higher resolution of the image: Herschel re-veals structures that cannot be discerned in the Spitzer image. Both images were taken at a wave-length of 160 microns. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SINGS; ESA and the PACS Consortium

Milky Way's Super-efficient Particle Accelerators Caught in The Act

Thanks to a unique "ballistic study" that combines data from ESO's Very Large

Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, as-tronomers have now

solved a long-standing mystery of

the Milky Way's parti-cle accelerators.

They show in a paper published today on

Science Express that cosmic rays from our galaxy are very effi-

ciently accelerated in the remnants of ex-

ploded stars.

During the Apollo flights astronauts reported seeing odd flashes of light, visible even with their eyes closed. We have since learnt that the cause was cosmic rays - extremely energetic particles from outside the Solar System arriving at the Earth, and constantly bombarding its atmosphere. Once they reach Earth, they still have sufficient energy to cause glitches in electronic com-ponents.

Galactic cosmic rays come from sources inside our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and consist mostly of protons moving at close to the speed of light, the "ultimate speed limit" in the Universe. These protons have been accelerated to energies exceeding by far the energies that even CERN's Large Hadron Collider will be able to achieve.

"It has long been thought that the super-accelerators that produce these cosmic rays in the Milky Way are the expanding envelopes created by exploded stars, but our observations reveal the smoking gun that proves it", says Eveline Helder from the Astronomical Institute Utrecht of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the first author of the new study.

"You could even say that we have now confirmed the calibre of the gun used to accelerate cosmic rays to their tremen-dous energies", adds collaborator Jacco Vink, also from the Astronomical Institute Utrecht.

For the first time Helder, Vink and colleagues have come up with a measurement that solves the long-standing astro-nomical quandary of whether or not stellar explosions produce enough accelerated particles to explain the number of cosmic rays that hit the Earth's atmosphere. The team's study indicates that they indeed do and it directly tells us how much energy is removed from the shocked gas in the stellar explosion and used to accelerate particles.

"When a star explodes in what we call a supernova a large part of the explosion energy is used for accelerating some particles up to extremely high energies", says Helder. "The energy that is used for particle acceleration is at the expense of heating the gas, which is therefore much colder than theory predicts".

The researchers looked at the remnant of a star that exploded in AD 185, as recorded by Chinese astronomers. The rem-nant, called RCW 86, is located about 8200 light-years away towards the constellation of Circinus (the Drawing Com-pass). It is probably the oldest record of the explosion of a star.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, the team measured the temperature of the gas right behind the shock wave created by the stellar explosion. They measured the speed of the shock wave as well, using images taken with NASA's X-ray Observatory Chandra three years apart. They found it to be moving at between 10 and 30 million km/h, between 1 and 3 percent the speed of light.

The temperature of the gas turned out to be 30 million degrees Celsius. This is quite hot compared to everyday stan-dards, but much lower than expected, given the measured shock wave's velocity. This should have heated the gas up to at least half a billion degrees.

"The missing energy is what drives the cosmic rays", concludes Vink.

Space Shuttle Science Shows How 1908 Tunguska Explosion Was Caused By A Comet

ScienceDaily

The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.

The research connects the two events by what followed each about a day later: brilliant, night-visible clouds, or noctilucent clouds, that are made up of ice particles and only form at very high altitudes and in extremely cold temperatures.

"It's almost like putting together a 100-year-old murder mys-tery," said Michael Kelley, the James A. Friend Family Distin-guished Professor of Engineering at Cornell who led the re-search team. "The evidence is pretty strong that the Earth was hit by a comet in 1908." Previous speculation had ranged from comets to meteors.

The researchers contend that the massive amount of water vapor spewed into the atmosphere by the comet's icy nucleus was caught up in swirling eddies with tremendous energy by a process called two-dimensional turbulence, which explains why the noctilucent clouds formed a day later many thousands of miles away.

Noctilucent clouds are the Earth's highest clouds, forming natu-rally in the mesosphere at about 55 miles over the polar regions during the summer months when the mesosphere is around minus 180 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 117 degrees Celsius).

The space shuttle exhaust plume, the researchers say, resembled the comet's action.

A single space shuttle flight injects 300 metric tons of water vapor into the Earth's thermosphere, and the water particles have been found to travel to the Arctic and Antarctic regions, where they form the clouds after settling into the meso-sphere. Kelley and collaborators saw the noctilucent cloud phenomenon days after the space shuttle Endeavour (STS-118) launched on Aug. 8, 2007. Similar cloud formations had been observed following launches in 1997 and 2003.

Following the 1908 explosion, known as the Tunguska Event, the night skies shone brightly for several days across Europe, particularly Great Britain -- more than 3,000 miles away. Kelley said he became intrigued by the historical eye-witness accounts of the aftermath, and concluded that the bright skies must have been the result of noctilucent clouds. The comet would have started to break up at about the same altitude as the release of the exhaust plume from the space shuttle following launch. In both cases, water vapor was injected into the atmosphere.

The scientists have attempted to answer how this water vapor traveled so far without scattering and diffusing, as conven-tional physics would predict.

"There is a mean transport of this material for tens of thousands of kilometers in a very short time, and there is no model that predicts that," Kelley said. "It's totally new and unexpected physics."

This "new" physics, the researchers contend, is tied up in counter-rotating eddies with extreme energy. Once the water vapor got caught up in these eddies, the water traveled very quickly -- close to 300 feet per second.

Scientists have long tried to study the wind structure in these upper regions of the atmosphere, which is difficult to do by such traditional means as sounding rockets, balloon launches and satellites, explained Charlie Seyler, Cornell professor of electrical engineering and paper co-author.

"Our observations show that current understanding of the mesosphere-lower thermosphere region is quite poor," Seyler said. The thermosphere is the layer of the atmosphere above the mesosphere.

In 1927 Professor Leonid Kulik took the first photo-graphs of the massive destruction of the taiga forest after the Tunguska catastrophe. (Credit: Professor Leonid Kulik)

AAL Astronomy Associates of Lawrence

University of Kansas Malott Hall 1251 Wescoe Hall Dr, Room 1082 Lawrence, KS 66045-7582

Celestial Mechanic July 2009