I realize no one reads my blogs any more, but if, say, half a dozen people did, right now they'd be going "Hey, man...can't you leave the meteor shit alone?" In fact those are the very people who should be paying attention. It's not about fear or anything like that. It's about Hey man, there's more going on out there than you can see on your smartphone screen. We're all a part of something bigger than our Facebook status and all that shit; shit that in reality makes us LESS connected, at least in ways that are real and that really matter, than more. I love my devices too. Maybe I just want to keep one foot in the analog world. It's much richer. A friend in the hand is worth two on the 'Book. Not to mention a three-minute meteor.
It's hard to get thoughts together about what to say about a three-minute meteor. I'll come back to it. Right now I have the meteor site on the taskbar as usual, and meteors are just pouring in at a steady clip that qualifies as a strong meteor shower, except that there's not a scheduled one going on. Of course they had to scramble to come up with some bullshit to explain this sky show that's been going on steadily for over a month. I think they're saying these are the Arietid meteors, and indeed they are coming from the constellation Aries, but according to the schedule the Arietids peaked on the 7th. You might see a few stragglers in the nights after a peak, but never, ever anything like this. Plus I looked on all the main sites and the Arietids wasn't listed on a single chart. I copy/pasted the lists. It's been putting out over 150 meteors per hour, and supposedly it takes place every year. No fucking way. If you want to tell me seriously that in half a century of meteor-watching I'd have missed something like that, well...I guess you can, but you'd be wrong.
At least some sites are honest and they say they have no idea where these are coming from. Even the NASA site starts off that way, but in the next paragraph all of the sudden they change gears and say "Thee are from the Arietids." Okay, but how did it get from "We don't know" to "We do know?" It's right there on the site. It's nothing but more confusion. Most people, if confused, would rather just give up and say "It is what it is" that try to get to the bottom of it for even one second. It's far too taxing to their brains. It's easier just to let someone else do the thinking for them. If this sounds crazy...GOOD! Just do me one favor please. If you're going to call someone crazy, at least give them a fair trial. Is their view automatically bullshit just because it differs from yours? Your opinions aren't always right. Neither are mine. Neither are anyone's. That's what respect is about. Try to prove them wrong before you disagree out of hand just because something doesn't fit into your little box. There's a hell of a lot of territory outside your little box. You really might be surprised. More importantly you might learn something. What I'm saying is true.
In any case a three-minute meteor changes the game. Actually the ones that started coming in last year that lasted ten, fifteen, thirty seconds and finally up to the single one last year that lasted two minutes were game-changers, but a three-minute meteor isn't normal. Most meteors hit the atmosphere hauling ass and they burn up in seconds if that. We've seen those. Maybe we've gotten lucky and seen a really big one that lasted five seconds. In years past that was a cosmic light show. I haven't seen one yet, but compared to the images in my mind of some of the really big ones I've seen that made me gasp, the idea of seeing one that lasts three minutes is hard to imagine. I'm looking.
We're passing through a random debris trail like they've been saying since late last year. That's all there is to it. I've been watching meteors come in every day for the last five weeks at least. Now I'm only paying attention to meteors that last over a minute. A year ago I'd have laughed at that notion. Where are these bitches coming from? First off they said it was the Lyrids. Okay. I know that except for breaks of a few days in between there's some meteor shower going on all year long, but in the past they've usually been very minor events. Occasionally I've seen some good ones, but every year it's typically the Leonids and the Perseids that are the main showers, and it goes down in intensity sharply from there. One thing I like about livemeteors is that if I do know that one of these minor showers is coming up I can go to the site and see if it's a good one, and then maybe I'll go out and try to see some.
So I went "Okay, the Lyrids. Don't keep up with those, but maybe they were just gnarly this year." Okay. Then we passed through the tail of Halley's Comet. Fair enough. Next up was one of the minor showers. This year it was massive. How about that. Two unheard-of huge ones in a row. Okay...odd are against it, but okay. Not to mention Halley's sandwiched in between, but shit happens. Now we just had the Arietids, which turned out to be the third usually-pissant-but-now-massive showers. Odds are highly against that, but okay. Then here comes a three-minute meteor. WTF? New one on me, bro. You can't write that off. BTW the guy who put up this video, one MrMBB333, who has an excellent and highly-informative channel, said that this one basically shut down the Canadian site for several minutes. It's not designed to handle meteors of that intensity. Livemeteors does a better job but they've been completely pegged a few times over the last few days. If this were to keep up for any length of time both sites would have to completely retool their systems and add more headroom to the graphs just to be able to record the data.
If you've made it this far, congratulations. Next cup of coffee's on me. I think I know what the deal is on three-minute meteors. IN MY OPINION, there are only two things that could cause this. No...three actually, but I'm not going to pursue that choice at the moment. That would be that these are something other than meteors. One main guy flatly stated it. Some say it's Saucers. I say if it's Saucers, they're not having a very good time. Whatever these things are...meteors...asteroids...space junk...Interstellar flying pigs...Luke Skywalker...Arietids or whatever, they're blowing up. That can't be much fun. No, I'm going under the assumption that they're meteors. I love crazy shit, but three-minute meteors (3MM from here on out) are plenty crazy enough. It's every bit as crazy as UFOs to me.
A meteor could only go so incredibly slowly if it were either huge, or just moving slowly to begin with. I think it's a bit of both, but mostly the latter. They're definitely much larger than normal, but if they were so huge that they survived the atmosphere they'd be hitting Earth all day long. Some of them are making landfall, including one day before yesterday in India maybe, and a massive one that hit Australia completely without warning a few months ago. Meteorites hit the Earth all the time, but the frequency is definitely going way up. It's on record. If these were all simply too massive to burn up in the atmosphere we'd know about it. The other choice is that they're moving much more slowly to begin with. That's the simplest explanation, and that's usually the best.
Meteors usually hit the atmosphere at around 80,000MPH. That's quick. The slowest ones never go below about 55K. These obviously are much, much slower. The difference in speed between every single meteor I've ever seen and the one I saw two nights ago and the one last year would be very hard to even estimate. It's the hare and the tortoise. Your brain doesn't want to accept it as a meteor for the difference in speed alone. I hope someone will be able to calculate the speed of some of these creeping monsters. My best guess would be that they're easily 500-1,000 times slower than normal. How could a meteor violate its own specs and still be a meteor? I think it's because these meteors originate a lot closer to home.
The Kuiper Belt sits about three planets away. It's a ring of debris that most people think was once a planet that was hit by another body. Objects range from the size of dust up to the size of small moons. In fact many people think Pluto was snagged from the Kuiper Belt by gravity. Meteors that hit our atmosphere every day presumably have been travelling for millions of miles and maybe millions of years or more. Some of them have been slingshotted along the way by the gravity of various bodies, and are going much faster than average, but the point is meteors usually go very fast. These don't. Something must be knocking objects loose from the Kuiper Belt. If something hit the Belt it would be like a break in pool. Objects would go out ahead of the impact in all directions in roughly a 160-degree arc, and some would head our way. They're not the same objects that have been sailing through space at insane speeds forever. They're from close by. They've been orbiting the Sun at a relatively slow pace so they aren't going anywhere near 80,000MPH to begin with. They're sped up by the impact, but they don't instantly start going 80K. They're going fast enough to burn up in the atmosphere, but they've come from close by and haven't even begun to build up speed by the time they get here. Momentum is conserved, so they're slow at first, and it might take another million years for them to get up to speed.
These objects are our neighbors to begin with. During this long post (sorry) I've heard two reports so far of people seeing these meteors this morning in broad daylight. They say they're spectacular. I guess so. It's cloudy here now or I'd have a crick in my neck instead of blogging. If these meteors carried luggage, it'd have stickers that said GREETINGS from the KUIPER BELT. I'd bet my kit on it. Heads up. Might see one. Have a nice day!
No comments:
Post a Comment