Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Hey, remember my slapping down a video that was full of baloney about asteroid TU24?

Well, there is more of that garbage floating around You Tube, this time from user "TU24dotORG". The video in question is full of what I can politely call inaccuracies. The basic premise is that this asteroid, which will pass our planet by quite some distance on January 29, may cause all kinds of havoc on Earth. Why? Well, because they say so.

For example, it says,

Although the chances of a direct impact with Earth are very minimal, truth is we don’t know much about TU24.

"Very minimal" overstates it. The chances are essentially 0. It’ll miss us by hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

But that’s not the point of that part of the video; the creator is trying to promote fear by saying astronomers don’t understand the asteroid. The next part of the video points out a few things about the asteroid we don’t know yet, like the asteroid’s pole direction, its rotation period, the light curve amplitude, and the spectral class.

Well, that means we don’t know if it’s spinning, how much the brightness fluctuates with time, or whether this is an iron or rocky asteroid.

My reply to that is… so? While those may be of scientific interest, they make no difference at all to the fact that the asteroid won’t hit us, and poses zero danger. That part of the video is literally laughable, in that I actually laughed out loud when I saw it.

The next bit shows a webpage about the asteroid saying that better astrometry (physical measurements of the asteroid’s position on the sky) is needed, but that’s always true, for every asteroid! That has nothing to bear on the (false) claim that this asteroid is a threat. We need to refine the orbit of the object, get the error bars lowered in our ability to predict its future positions. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know where it will be in a few weeks to pretty good accuracy.

This is simple fear mongering on the part of the person who made this video, and I take a very dim view of that. A very dim view.

In the next section, the video creator says that Comet Holmes was "40% more massive than our Sun".

This may be ad hominem, but I’d have a pretty hard time believing someone’s claims when they confuse mass with size. Comet Holmes has a very small mass, more like that of a mountain, trillions of times less than the Sun’s mass. While the expanding gas cloud from it got bigger than the Sun in diameter, it was very, very tenuous, like a high grade vacuum by lab standards. The mass was teeny tiny.

The video creator then goes on about the electric universe, a long-discredited theory mostly supported by people who have a hard time grasping that large objects are electrically neutral. They think that things like the Earth exchange vast amounts of electric charge with everything around them, which is pretty silly. We have actual satellites in space that measure electrical and magnetic discharges, and while this stuff is extraordinarily complicated and the details certainly aren’t ironed out, it’s very clear that the claims of the EU people are totally wrong.

To prove my point, the video then shows lightning, and says it’s plasma discharge from the Sun. Oops. The guy who made the video confuses lightning with the aurora borealis. Not a good sign.

Inexplicably, the video then jumps to 2007 WD5, an asteroid that will pass close to Mars around the same time TU24 passes the Earth. It says that WD5 picked up positive ions from the Earth when it passed us on November 2. Thing is, it passed us at a distance of 7 million kilometers. That’s a wee bit far (18 times the Moon’s distance) to have picked up anything from us! If it could do that, why doesn’t the Moon pick up loads more charge?

Oh yeah, because this stuff is wrong.

Then the video gets nasty, and particularly evil. It says that TU24 (the one that gets kinda close to us later this month) could

… easily cause earthquakes, deadly storms, and massive eruptions of fire across hundreds or even thousands of square miles.

That’s complete and utter crap. And it gets worse.

It then says,

Think an asteroid can’t do this?

One already has…

100 years ago

TUNGUSKA.

Yeah, well, there’s an eensy weensy difference between the Tunguska impactor and TU24: the Tunguska impactor was an impactor. It hit us. TU24 won’t hit us.

Feh.

Then the video does the usual and expected paranoid thing, saying NASA won’t admit how close it will get, yadda yadda.

Let me be perfectly clear: this video is almost entirely garbage. The asteroid will miss by hundreds of thousands of kilometers, so there will be no direct impact. There’s no such thing as a "negative asteroid", like they claim, the plasma discharges they talk about are a totally different phenomenon, and nothing like that has ever been seen in an asteroid, nor will it ever. Asteroids don’t carry charges like that, and wouldn’t couple well with the Earth’s magnetosphere the way they claim anyway.

We’re totally safe from this asteroid in January, and I’d bet anything on it. Literally.

Some people might think I am being harsh; however, doomcryers are, in my opinion, among the lowest form of life. If they’re conmen (or pranksters) then they’re a particularly fetid brand of evil, and if they’re honest, they’re not trying very hard to educate themselves on reality (yet going to a lot more trouble to make YouTube videos about it). A third kind, of course, may be honest people with mental problems, and so in my opinion are worthy of our sympathy. But that doesn’t mean we cannot take action to correct what they are doing.

In the end, as well, all three kinds of fearmonger try very hard to scare people, and facts be damned. And many times I’ve seen people good and truly scared by garbage like this. I get emails…

Needless to say I’ll try to stay on top of stuff like this. I’m just glad in a week people like "TU24dotORG" will be out of a job. Temporarily, of course, until they find the next thing they can terrorize people with. Grrrrr.

Many thanks to BABLoggee Ibeechu for letting me know about this.

Welcome Farkers! Well, everyone but aerojockey.

Wow, some antiscience claims are so weird it’s a wonder anyone can take them seriously.

Take this blog post about the image here, for example. In just a few words, it manages to get nearly everything wrong. A lot of it is in Japanese, but some is in English:

A man is in the photograph which the Mars explorer Spirit (it stopped transmitting data in 2004) sent.

First, puhlllleeeeze. A man? It’s a tiny rock only a few inches high. It’s only a few feet from the rover! Here’s the image from NASA. As usual for antiscience nonsense, they point to a press release image with no indication of when it was taken, or what the original image is. There are thousands of Spirit images, and I have little desire to comb through them looking for this one (though it appears to be early in the mission; it’s still on the landing accouterments).

Second, Spirit stopped transmitting data in 2004? Well, kinda. It did stop, but then it started again. We’re still getting good stuff from both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars. The blog post seems to phrase it that way on purpose, to make it sound like Something Mysterious Happened.

Now, I don’t read Japanese, so this may be a misunderstanding on my part. Are they just pointing out something funny looking? Maybe. FWIW, the site appears to be about weird images and such. But I see so much of this, and there is no lower limit to the dumbosity of such claims, that it just makes sense to figure on the lowest common denominator.

Anyway, the image itself is, of course, yet another example of pareidolia, our ability to see patterns in random shapes. That does look like a guy hanging out on Mars, enjoying the 0.01 Earth atmospheric pressure, the 98% CO₂ air, the subfreezing cold, and of course, just being four inches tall. Martians are pretty short, it seems. And patient, given its pose.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to BABloggee piotr slisz.

James Oberg is a NASA historian, space guy, and very knowledgeable source of info on the space program. Like me, he has little tolerance for the nonsensical spewings of people like Richard C. Hoagland, who couldn’t find reality with both hands, an instruction manual, and a pickax.

Jim puts the hurt on RCH in an article about Mars probes for The Space Review. He systematically, and with references, shows exactly why RCH’s writings are so much crank goofiness.

It’s disturbing, actually, that a book by the likes of Hoagland can become so popular. People are all-too willing to believe anything written down, especially if it agrees with their preconceptions, and especially if the author seems like an expert, even when it’s specifically proven that his credentials are more inflated than Pamela Anderson.

Oberg is relentless in his pwning of RCH and his book. It makes you wonder, in my opinion, just what is going on in the head of RCH (and Mike Bara, his coauthor) when he writes that stuff. Can he actually believe in what he is saying?

A big hole (1.5 meters across) appeared in a frozen pond in Canada last Friday. The ice is half a meter thick, so whatever did it packed a heckuva punch.

Was it a meteorite?

Maybe. Hard to say. No one saw or heard anything (of course, it was 80 bazillion degrees below 0 Friday night there)^*, and I’m thinking it would have to have been a fair-sized chunk of iron to make that big a hole. The size of the hole indicates a big meteorite if it was one, so it might have still been hot when it hit (smaller ones slow down a lot and cool off before impact).

Of course, other things fall from the sky. Something from an airplane? Kids screwing around (dropping anvils in the middle of ponds…? Maybe not)? I hope they search the pond after it thaws, because I’m curious to know what this thing is. And if it is a meteorite, it’s worth a fortune.

^*Update: Commenter Jamie says in fact lots of people did hear and feel something that night. I’m not seeing anything searching Google news though. If that story is right, then it’s definitely worth looking for the object that punched the hole.

Tip of the Whipple Shield to Fark.

365 days left… unless the Constitution gets suspended.

io9 is a newish blog-like thing with rapid-fire updates, gossip, and photos from the world of science fiction. It’s actually very cool, catering precisely to folks like me: science fiction fans who have grown up, take it semi-seriously, but like the occasional cup of snark. The writers clearly love (and are extremely intimate with) the genre and have lots of cool stuff on the blog (though they seemed to have liked the suckfest that was Pitch Black), and their insider info is impressive.

It’s actually hard to pin down their topics. They have a post on scifi t-shirts, and another on Clinton era scifi, as well as the odd science fact article or two.

All in all I really recommend it. But it’s not for the faint of heart: they update a lot. It’s can be hard to keep up; I missed a week (blogging the AAS) and came home to 140+ posts! Most are easy to scan through, but yikes. But read it if you have the time; it’s worth it.