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March 7, 1997 - Art Bell
01:50:47
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Alan Hale - Comet Hale-Bopp
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From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening.
Here's Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
And it is going to be an interesting show this morning.
We're going to talk comets with Dr. Alan Hale, who is the co-discoverer of the Hale-Bopp comet.
And we're going to try and drill into some brains out there that you've got to get your butt out the door and take a look at this thing, because it's not something that you have to go search real hard for at the right time.
You go out, and it hits you right in the eye, as long as you've got a relatively cloudless sky.
It is the comet of your lifetime, I believe.
And it's being undercovered in the media.
But moved with his family to Alamogordo, New Mexico later that year, where he lived.
Until his graduation from high school in 1976, then attending the U.S.
Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
After graduating from there in 1980 with a bachelor's degree in physics, he was stationed at various assignments in San Diego and Long Beach.
After getting out of the Navy in 1983, worked for two and a half years as an engineering contractor for the Deep Space Network at JPL in Pasadena.
Was involved, among other things, with the Voyager 2 encounter, ...with a planet Uranus in 1986.
Later that year, left JPL, returned to New Mexico in order to attend graduate school at New Mexico State University, earned his Ph.D.
in astronomy from NMSU, New Mexico University in 1992, and during the following year, founded and became director of the Southwest Institute for Space Research.
Now based in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, the Institute is an independent research organization that strives to enhance the scientific literacy of the general public through the providing of opportunities for direct participation in research programs and through other educational activities.
His professional interests include the study of stars, like the Sun, and the search for other solar systems, including those that may contain planets Similar to Earth.
He has authored several research papers in this field.
He is also interested in the present efforts to identify potential Earth-impacting asteroids and comets, and is currently engaged in initiating a search program for these objects to be conducted from southern New Mexico, which will include participation by school students and the general public.
He, of course, is the co-discoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp.
That was in July of 1995.
And now, from New Mexico, and here to tell us which city will be impacted by Comet Hale-Bopp, and which Pleiadium Beam ship is lurking behind the comet, carrying thousands of green people, is Alan Hale.
Alan, hi!
Good morning.
Good morning.
I hope you have a sense of humor.
You have to ask the people who know me.
Some might say I do, some might say I don't.
I see.
All right.
Well, before the night's over, I'm sure we'll find out.
Let us begin, I guess, Alan, by airing the fact that we did have differences.
We did.
Way back when, when the Courtney Brown affair began, I was upset with you over the Chuck Schrammich business, and I'm sure you were upset with me over the way I handled the news or the information I received from Chuck Schrammich and from Professor Brown.
And so all of that did occur, and if you have any comments on it, I think you referred to my program as the Weekly World News of Radio.
Or something like that.
And so we had all that happen between us, but it is my view that what's going on in our sky right now is a whole lot more important than any differences we had.
And I think we're both willing to let those go, and you've got a hell of a comet out there, my friend.
I get, every single morning, because of my hours, you know, after the show, I go out and take a look, and this comet Okay.
Well, it was an ordinary old night, really, although it was a very gorgeous one.
As in that bio sheet that I sent you, I follow known comets as a hobby.
Everybody wants to know, to the day you discovered this comet, what was it like?
Well, it was an ordinary old night, really, although it was a very gorgeous one.
As in that bio sheet that I sent you, I follow known comets as a hobby.
There's usually two or three or more visible with a decent telescope on any given clear
night if you know what you're looking for.
The overwhelming majority of those things are dinky little fuzzy things that very few people pay attention to except for those of us who actually do follow and study these things.
I had gone out that evening to look at the two convoys I was following.
If you're familiar with the weather in this part of the country, you probably are.
We get a lot of rain that time of the year.
Oh, well, of course we have our problems for a while in the southwest, but most of the year it's good.
Yeah, most of the year it's pretty good, but that time of the year we get a lot of rain in this part of the country.
And it was the first clear night we'd had in about a week and a half, because of all the rain.
And anyway, I'd gone out to look at the two comets, and I had finished with the first one, and realized I had about an hour to wait before the other comet rose above my house, so I have an hour to kill.
And it was a gorgeous night.
It can be very beautiful in this part of the country.
And I thought I'd just pass the time by looking at some star clusters, gas clouds, various objects like that, in the Milky Way, including in Sagittarius.
And I turned the telescope towards one star cluster in Sagittarius, and looked at the eyepiece, and I happened to see a little fuzzy thing nearby.
A little fuzzy thing nearby.
Yeah.
And I guess we should explain to people, and I'm a layman now, and so you'll have to help me, but stars shouldn't be fuzzy, should they?
No, they're not.
The stars are little points of light.
Presuming you've got everything focused right.
Sure.
Fuzzy thing means, generally, what?
Corona, or is it coma?
It could mean a lot of things.
There's a lot of fuzzy objects in the sky.
Star clusters, galaxies, gas clouds.
And the sky is riddled with these things, as any would-be comet discoverer quickly learns.
The sky is completely littered with these things.
Which is why we have star atlases, which tell us what's where.
And which is one of the very first things I did was to check my star atlases to see if there was anything plotted in that position.
And there didn't seem to be anything.
There was a star cluster that I was looking at.
Of course, that was plotted.
But there wasn't anything plotted around it.
There wasn't supposed to be a fuzzy thing there.
There didn't seem to be.
So, the one dead giveaway for a comet is a comet will move against the background stars over a period of a couple of hours.
Sure.
Since they're members of the solar system.
When did your heart begin to beat a little faster?
It was starting to, I guess, to do this as I was going along on kind of a gradually increasing basis.
I went through all the catalogs just to make sure there was nothing cataloged in that position.
There didn't seem to be anything.
When did your heart begin to beat a little faster?
It was starting to, I guess, to do this as I was going along on kind of a gradually increasing
basis.
I did one other check because I wanted to see if there were any known comments in that
position.
So I logged on to the Internet.
Log on to the computer at the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or the World's Clearing House for reporting and announcing comet discoveries.
They have all the information that's necessary there.
Ran their comet identification program to see if there were any comets in that position.
It said there were none.
So it was very interesting by this point.
I've got an object.
It doesn't seem to be anything listed in that position, either galaxies or comets or anything.
I actually did send a tentative email to the Central Bureau telling them I had a possible comet at that point.
And then I went outside and looked at the eyepiece of the telescope and I saw, beyond all doubt, that the thing had moved.
So I knew I had a comet at this point.
So now you know you've got a comet.
At this point, one question would be, why does Alan Hale get to discover a comet when there's all these great big university telescopes out there?
I mean, gigantic telescopes, and yet Alan Hale, in his backyard, Is finding this comet, and they're not, how come?
Usually the large telescopes at the observatories like Kitt Peak, Palomar, Mauna Kea, and all these places around the world, they're very large instruments with very small fields, and they're dedicated to looking at very specific objects.
And they're not engaged in survey work.
You know, covering large areas of the sky.
Somebody has research projects where they're looking at very specific objects.
So then it's actually more likely that an amateur would discover A comet than one of the university telescopes?
Yes, it is.
Okay.
So now, at this point, you think you've got a comet.
What are the odds that somebody else, the mysterious, I might add, Mr. Bob, and I'm going to ask you about that, would discover a comet at exactly the same time?
Ordinarily, they would be pretty slim, but since this comet was next to a fairly well-known Really, anyone who was looking at that star cluster at that same time, that same night, should have seen the same object.
Would have gone, wow, what's that?
Yeah.
In fact, I was surprised that there was only one other report.
Also, was that report lodged roughly at the same time prior to you, just after you, or how does that work?
It was after me.
Tom Popp actually saw the object right around the same time I did.
We were certainly within a few minutes of each other.
And to be truthful, neither one of us really knows who was first because neither of us bothered to check our watches at that particular point in time.
Okay.
Too excited, I'm sure.
Yeah.
But I had an unfair advantage over Tom.
I work at home.
My computer is here.
I went inside and sent an email.
Pretty quick.
Tom was in the desert, 90 miles away from anywhere.
Had to hop into his car and drive home and send a telegram.
So my report beat his by a few hours.
So I take it at some point then, after they had come back to you and told you, oh yes, you found the comet.
Guess what, folks?
You found the comet.
Then how do they arbitrate what the comet is to be called?
the namesake, how it all shakes out.
Who arbitrates that?
Okay, well there's a long-standing tradition, goes back over two centuries now,
that comets are named after the people who discover them.
Sure.
There is now a committee of astronomers who are members of the International Astronomical Union
who are tasked with responsibility of naming a comet.
The usual procedure now is we wait a few days till we get an orbit for the comet
to make sure it's not some long-lost object that's been lost.
We don't want to add a bunch of names to it unnecessarily.
So as soon as we have an orbit for a comet, they will then go ahead and name it.
This is usually two or three days.
Alright, I've got a whole series of questions about Hale-Bopp.
The first one is, Even some major university astronomers were puzzled that Hale-Bopp went out beyond the orbit of Venus, you know, way out there, seemed to be... Orbit of Jupiter, you mean?
Jupiter, I'm sorry, seemed to be so bright, unaccountably bright, outgassing like crazy, more outgassing than should occur for the amount of energy available from the Sun to be causing that.
And for that reason, a lot of them back then were saying, we think this is first time round for Hale-Bopp.
No, they really weren't quite saying that.
The comet was definitely very active and very bright.
In fact, it was unprecedentedly bright for a comet at that distance.
Although we do occasionally see comets that have outbursts, which blow off material for reasons which we don't entirely understand yet at that distance.
In fact, there's one comet that travels around the Sun in almost circular orbit between Jupiter and Saturn.
And usually it's a very dim object, but every once in a while, every once or twice a year or so, blows off material, brightens up for two or three weeks, and then kind of fades around again until six or eight months later when it blows again.
And there was some thought that the comet was actually something like this.
Tom and I just happened to spy this thing when it was going through such an outburst like that.
And, of course, it turns out it wasn't.
The comet continued to brighten at that point.
Didn't fade away.
So then we don't really fully understand the physics behind what can cause that kind of an outburst that far away from an energy source that could cause it, huh?
Well, I mean, there clearly are packets of volatile materials underneath the surfaces of these dirty snowballs, as it were.
There was some question for a little while as to what was driving all this activity.
We knew it couldn't be water.
The main constituent of a comet nucleus is water, and we're definitely too far out at that point in the solar system for water to start supplementing.
So there was a question for a month or two exactly what was causing all the activity.
Once some people were able to observe this with the appropriate radio telescopes, they were able to see the signatures of carbon monoxide.
And carbon monoxide will sublimate at the temperatures at which the comet was experiencing at that time.
We had a handle within a month or so that, yeah, the activity we're seeing is driven by carbon monoxide.
The question that I think was in a lot of my mind then was, well, is this really just a carbon monoxide-rich comet?
How's the water ratio compared to carbon monoxide?
So we had to wait about a year before we really started seeing water kick in in earnest, which it did.
How big is Hale-Bopp?
Good question.
We really don't know.
We can't really see the nucleus in this thing.
The cloud of material around it is just so thick that we really just can't see the nucleus.
If we could do like we did with Halley 11 years ago, send a spacecraft by, take images, it's very easy to get a nucleus by that way.
Comet Hyakutake a year ago, came by close enough to the Earth, we actually, people out
at JPL were able to bounce radar beams off the nucleus and get a return signal and get a size estimate that way.
But we can't do that with Hillbop, we're not sending any spacecraft out to it unfortunately.
And it's not coming close enough to the Earth to do a radar experiment, unfortunately.
How about a best guess?
The best guess we have right now, and this was taken with Hubble Space Telescope images back in the fall of 1995,
with a few assumptions thrown in, the diameter we came up with was something like 40 kilometers or 25 miles.
But there are so many assumptions that went into that figure that people came up with us to take it with a grain of salt.
Early on, when the comet was first discovered, they were coming up with some pretty big figures.
I recall over 100 miles in diameter.
And that still really could be?
Probably not.
The Hubble data that we got from Apollo 95 that I was just referring to suggests an upper limit of about 70 kilometers.
70 kilometers.
Still a big piece of ice.
Still a pretty big piece of ice.
Again, 40 was the most likely value.
Put that word most likely in quote marks.
But it could be quite a bit smaller.
It depends on how much the surface is active and a lot of things that we really can't tell.
We had to make a few assumptions.
All right.
To dispel all rumors that have been floating around on the internet for a long time, I have a little stack of them here that talk about course corrections.
OK.
I take it that you've not noted any course corrections thus far with the Hale-Bopp.
OK.
Let me tell you what I believe is the probable start of that whole business.
Once a comet's discovered, the idea is, what's its orbit?
Astronomers from around the world, both professional and amateur astronomers, will go out and make precise measurements of its position.
Then once we have a baseline of usually two or three days, we can calculate an orbit and see what the comet's doing.
How far out is it?
How close is it going to get to the Sun, Earth, and so on?
Hale-Bopp presented a very difficult case because it was so far out, it was very difficult to get any kind of a decent orbit for it.
In fact, the first orbit, which was published Well, I guess three or four days after his discovery did indicate that it was far out and was coming in close, but that it was so uncertain.
I mean, really, they had almost nothing to work with.
So in other words, as they refined the orbit of Hale-Bopp, it appeared to some people that these were course corrections.
Right.
It was actually just a refinement of the orbit based on the data.
It was really almost two weeks.
before Brian Marsden at the Central Bureau was able to finally get a valid, decent orbit out of the data he had.
I mean, the original orbit that was published a week and a half earlier was based on almost nothing,
but they wanted to get some kind of an orbit out, just to have a vague idea of what this thing is doing.
All right. In my lifetime, there have been a number of comets that have really been given big billing.
Boy, the media just went bonkers, and this is going to be the most incredible thing you ever saw.
And it poops out.
And that has happened several times in my life.
Iokotaki was kind of an interesting surprise.
But finally, we have a comet that is either meeting or exceeding the expectations.
And the media, for some reason, is So silent about it, and we'll address that at the bottom of the hour.
That's what I want to ask you about when we come back.
Remember that, folks?
Remember it's got to be the comet of the century with these other comets?
And then all of a sudden, it just sort of, it's like somebody turns the dimmer down and it doesn't meet expectations.
Well, guess what?
This one does.
All these other years of publicity about Comets, they were going to be a big deal and pooped out totally.
And here, your Comet, or everybody's Comet, is really living up to, or exceeding expectations, and I guess that too is a question, and we're not getting the big network publicity that we ought to be getting.
What's going on?
I'm not sure I entirely agree with that contention, although I guess I have a biased viewpoint.
As I said, I would like to see this thing get as much publicity as it absolutely could.
And if you had been around me, say, the past three or four weeks or so and listened to my phone ring off the wall, you would dispute the contention of us not getting any publicity.
Well, when I said that, I guess I meant, I don't see a... Well, alright, you give me the name.
What was the name of that big comet that pooped out?
You may be referring to Comica Hotech back in the early 1970s.
I certainly am.
Okay.
And the networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, they were all hyping it up like crazy.
It's going to be incredible.
And then it pooped out.
Yeah, although I don't know how much, I don't remember how long before its actual pre-display, the press really started coming out in the big.
My experience has been the public seems to have a rather short attention span.
And even though we've known about Hale-Bopp for a year and a half, and we've known that at least it possessed the potential for a decent display for that long, it seems like nobody was paying too much attention to it, with a few exceptions, I guess you being one of them, until fairly recently.
My experience is now that the press is discovering this thing, and I have had phone calls and interviews with CNN, I've had discussions with and some of the networks already, some of the major news
magazines and so on.
So it is starting to get some publicity right now.
Of course, here we are approaching peak display within the next month or so.
All right. That is the next question.
What is your what's forecast?
If you can do a comet forecast.
OK. Keep in mind, there's always amount of guesswork involved.
And as my good friend David Levy, who's the Levy in Shemeka Levy 9, by the way,
he has a quote that I really love to use, and that's the comets are like cats.
They have tails and they do whatever they want.
And there's a lot of truth to that. Oh, yes.
The comet is closest to the Earth on March 22nd and closest to the sun on April 1st,
which means that theoretically speaking, the comet should be brightest right around the end of this
month, beginning of April.
Which is the more important date?
The proximity to Earth or the proximity to the Sun?
I don't really think there's either that's really more important than the other.
In terms of possible brightness?
Probably the Sun.
The Sun?
It's probably more important than the proximity to the Earth.
Although this is such a big bright comet, I don't think either specific date is more important than any other one.
It's true.
My feeling is that the comet will probably be at its best by maybe the second week of April for a couple of reasons.
One is the comet by that time gets high and well placed in the evening sky.
And for some strange reason people are much more willing to go out and see something in the evening
than they are to get up before dawn and look at something.
Also, usually a comet will have its best dust tail development after it has rounded the sun and is heading
back out.
Can I ask a dumb pedestrian question?
When you're looking at the comet and it is closer to the horizon,
would it be true that you're looking through an awful lot more atmosphere than when it gets up higher
and you're looking more or less, not straight up, but more or less vertically?
Yes.
So comet is, and for all objects in the sky for that matter, are more prominent when they're above the horizon, so you're not looking through as much crud.
Okay.
So by the second week of April or so, the comet is well up above the horizon.
It's not as close, it's higher up.
And you've got, at least if this comet follows the traditional thing that comets are supposed to do, whether or not this one will do it, it remains to be seen.
Uh, you'll probably have our longest and our brightest tail right around that time.
It seems to be the tail that makes the comet more than anything else, at least to the average person.
Oh, I don't know about that.
I guess I would have said that before I saw yours, or ours, or whoever it belongs to.
Um, it is spectacular.
In fact, people have no idea, those who have been too lazy so far, to get up early and lose a little sleep and go out and look.
Um, I took my wife out, who has seen a comet or two, like the Rocky and others.
And I took her out about a week and a half ago, and she said, holy smokes, or some derivation of that.
And that's how surprised she was, and how dramatic it is.
I mean, it really is dramatic.
Now, as you know, I got a really nice mead for Christmas.
Telescope.
And I find less magnification, more, to provide a better view, of the common.
I can't quite figure out why that is.
Okay, usually when you have a telescope or an object this size, you're actually cutting your field down too much.
You want really as wide a field as you can to grab more of the outside detail, especially when you start looking at the tails and some of these maybe lower brightness structures.
When you're putting on a telescope like that and putting on a magnification, you're almost looking right through it.
Hmm.
And that really kind of tends to lessen the contrast and you're not getting as much now.
A telescope will certainly give you a lot of very exciting views of what's going on in the middle of the coma.
Exactly.
Actually it was brighter and much more of a pinpoint uh... with the telescope more like a star frankly with the and then of course i could see the color but i was right in the middle of it so so you're correct about that effectively you might have also seen there's a lot of jets going off in that combat incredible amount of activity going on as a matter of fact doctor uh... the recent uh... a space shuttle mission uh... there was radio commentary and others have said that they see
Tails.
Can that be?
Yes.
I'm seeing two tails myself.
Oh, you are?
Yes.
The tails are made of different substances.
The one tail is made of ionized gas.
As the comet gets closer to the sun, the solar wind starts to ionize some of the molecules that are being blown off the nucleus.
The solar wind blows that back, so you're seeing ions.
In a way, it's almost like a neon sign that you're seeing, except different chemicals, different molecules.
And that is the tail.
It's the dimmer of the tail, at least to the eye.
It's the one that kind of hangs straight.
It's the one that's to the north, or if you're in the northern hemisphere, it's the one that's on the left side, hanging straight.
The molecules tend to fluoresce in the blue part of the spectrum, where our eyes aren't all that sensitive.
So it looks dim to the eye, although if you're in a dark side, you can see it pretty easily.
The other tail is made of dust particles that have been blown off the surface of this nucleus, and then being blown off the comet itself.
Each little dust particle goes into its own orbit around the sun, and they tend to lag behind the comet a little bit, so you'll see this very broad, curved tail, and that's the dust tail.
Since that's reflecting sunlight, that tail tends to be brighter to our own eyes than the other tail.
Fascinating.
And there were some early pictures taken of the comet that could use some explaining.
One was on the HaleBob.com site itself called HaleBob's Eyes.
What's your best take on what that was?
It seemed to show two equally bright comets side-by-side.
I took a brief look at that picture.
My feeling is that that was just probably an artifact in The electronic CCD camera that was used, I happened to be looking at the comet that very same night that that photo was taken, and I didn't see anything unusual about it.
So, more than likely, at least my feeling is, is that it was just an artifact, cosmic gray hits, an artifact in the processing of CCD images.
I'm not an expert, really, in taking CCD images, but I've taken some, and a lot of cosmic gray hits, just glitches in the software can produce things like this.
So it's not all that unusual.
All right.
I want to read you something and see if this makes any sense to you and have you explain what it means to me.
Here we go.
This is written by an astronomer named Mike.
I can't identify better than that.
We lost 3.5 days of our recent observing run due to a winter storm, but managed to obtain a total of six hours observing on the comet.
The water production rate is running about 1E31 molecules Slash per second, and the spectral lines are bright.
However, the continuum long word of 3 UM, whatever that is, has brightened enormously, enormously since January 21st.
So the line continuum brightness ratio is small.
This is getting tough.
Typically 0.14 bright lines.
This is similar to comet Hayakazaki during the IRTF Okay.
survey in mid-April of 96 in contrast sharply with our PI team, don't fall asleep folks,
data of March 23rd and 24th, we believe, this is the interesting line, we believe we are
seeing the signature of organic brain emission in the continuum intensity versus wavelength.
What does that mean?
Okay.
Organic molecules simply mean molecules which contain carbon.
There are a lot of substances, which contain carbon dioxide.
Of course, a lot of the chemicals within our own bodies are carbon compounds, so there's this impression, which is maybe half-true, that we're talking organic chemistry and organic compounds.
We're talking life, because life is carbon-based.
But there are plenty of other compounds which contain carbon, which really have nothing to do with life.
Hydrocarbons, smog, formaldehyde.
and various other substances of that nature.
We know that comets contain a fair amount of organic materials.
During the return of Halley 11 years ago, specifically the spacecraft flybys like the European Space Agency's JATO mission, detected a large number of organic molecules in and around Halley.
Alright then, let's back way up and let me ask you, What is a comet?
I mean, I know it's made of ice and some of the rest things we've talked about, but why do we have comets, cosmically?
Where are they from?
Okay, they are the leftovers from the days that the planets and the solar system formed about four and a half billion years ago.
If you look out in space, you will see large clouds of gas and dust scattered in various locations, and these dust clouds very often are sites of active star formations.
the clumps starting to break off, starting to collapse. As they collapse and start to spin up,
the material will start to fall into a disk surrounding the central star.
And so you have a large, the dust disk, if I said that right, in orbit around a star.
As these things orbit around the sun, each dust grain, eventually one dust grain will collide
with another dust grain and stick together. Now you have a bigger dust grain, which has more
more gravity than anything else until it is able to attract another dust grain.
So then you have yet a bigger dust grain, and give this process a few million years to go on, you eventually have large chunks of material maybe a few miles across.
Like when you made a ball of aluminum when you were a kid out of a little piece of aluminum.
Somewhat, yeah.
Alright, is this then part of a continuing process of creation, or is it a result of the old Big Bang?
No, this is...
The Big Bang, when we talk about the Big Bang, we're actually talking about the formation of the entire universe, which preceded this by some time.
We're talking processes which have been taking place since then, the actual formation of stars.
And some of the elements that we see in the gas and dust clouds in interstellar space actually are the result of older stars, which have gone supernova and blew a lot of material into space and enriched the gas and dust we see in space.
I've seen some pictures taken from Hubble of what appear to be the actual birthing of stars, some of the most incredible photographs I've ever seen.
Yeah, there's that one that I call the lava lamp image that's a real gorgeous image.
It really is, and is that what it is, the formation, the actual birth of stars?
Do you believe that's what we're seeing?
Yes, it is what we're seeing.
I mean, Chris, the star formation process is something which takes place over a period
of tens of millions of years.
And of course, we're here, our existence is a very tiny fraction of that.
Yes.
So, and if we were able to come back and look at that exact same part of the sky five million
years from now, we would see it looking quite a bit different.
We'd see stars there that we don't really see right now because those stars will have
formed, will start to have blown some of their dust envelopes away, and so on.
And this is a process which on our human time scale takes an enormously long amount of time,
although on an astronomical time scale it's actually not that long.
Doctor, in the universe, do you think it's more likely that life is prolific or non-existent on the scale that we have it here on Earth?
Okay.
In a way, this is a matter of opinion because we have a sample of one to work with.
Yes.
Although, depending on how the results are, the Martian fossils that were punitively announced last year, that may give us a sample of two if that turns out to be verified, but my own personal feeling is that we know life got started here on the Earth and it's
hard to believe that life would be so rare, the processes would actually be so rare that it
would only take place once.
The same physics and the same chemistry that works here on Earth should work everywhere
else throughout the universe. Life got started here, life should therefore get started as
long as the environmental conditions are suitable anywhere really, not the universe. So my own
feeling is that there is probably a lot of life throughout the universe.
Creation, evolution, common, not rare.
Okay, enter the comet.
Now, is it possible that a comet, remember when you were a kid and you had a daisy, and you went, and the seeds went everywhere.
Is a comet possibly a sort of a Johnny, a universal Johnny Appleseed delivering the seeds of life?
Oh, that idea has been batted around occasionally.
I don't think there's a lot of support or a lot of evidence for that particular idea.
One idea which does have some support among a lot of astronomers is we know that one of the primary constituents of a comet is water.
Right.
We know that the Earth has a fair amount of water and we know that the Earth was formed by the colliding of asked these chunks that I was referring to a few minutes
ago over a period of tens to hundreds of millions of years and of course during the
millions of years that have elapsed since its formation.
We know that comets have hit it and the comets have delivered water.
They must have delivered water since that's what they're made of to the Earth so it is
very possible that at least some amount of the Earth's water that we have right now is
due to cometary impacts over its history.
Is there any other way you can imagine that there appears to be water on the moon?
That would be by far the most likely source of it.
Keeping in mind that the reports that came out last year, which I'm sure are the ones you're referring to, the clementine data, we haven't verified that that's water ice yet.
We've got an interesting Radar signal.
In fact, it was the result of a deliberate search.
But that's really all it is right now.
Now the Lunar Prospector mission, which is supposed to be launched later this year, is designed to verify that one way or the other.
Whether or not we're actually seeing water ice at the moon's south pole.
If we do, cometary impacts is almost certainly where that water came from.
How big were the chunks of Shoemaker-Levy 9 as compared to what we believe the size of Hale-Bopp to be?
Hale-Bopp appears to be much larger.
Much larger?
Yeah.
The largest chunk which hit Jupiter from Shoemaker-Levy 9, I've seen various figures on this, but the one I've seen the most common It was probably on the order of about one kilometer across.
One kilometer?
Yeah.
Not all that big, really.
Of course, there was twenty-some chunks of various sizes, and that was about the largest one, so the overall object may have been three or four kilometers or so.
Okay, well, check me if I'm wrong, but I believe that I read somewhere that the marks left on Jupiter that we were able to observe from these impacts Were some of which were the size of Earth?
Yes.
Size of Earth?
Yes.
Uh-huh.
I don't know if you had a chance to actually see those.
Those big scars were visible with a pretty small telescope.
It was amazing.
Fantastic thing to see.
So, then it leads me to the question, should, which it will not, Kell-Bopp impact Earth, or the Moon, or something, even Mars?
What would happen?
The planet would go on its merry way.
I beg your pardon?
The moon or whatever object got hit would just go on its merry way.
I mean, yeah, Hale-Bopp is a large object for a comet, say, but compared to the mass of, say, the Earth, it's nothing.
It's trivial.
It's not even worth... Okay, the Earth would go on its merry way.
Well, would we go on our merry way?
No, we would not.
We wouldn't, eh?
Yeah.
It would be pretty bad news for any life forms on the Earth.
Cretaceous-tertiary impact of 65 million years ago, which most of us have now come to believe was what caused the dinosaurs to die out, was probably an object quite a bit smaller than Hale-Bopp, I think.
The estimates that I've seen usually say something like six miles or so.
All right, and we're a whole lot smaller than dinosaurs.
Doctors, stand by.
We'll be back to you.
This is CBC.
Saturn-like object, the companion, spaceships following Hillbob, blah, blah, blah,
we could go on and on.
How did you react?
The first indication I got of anything like this was the morning after the broadcast of your show
where this was discussed.
There was a radio station in Cincinnati called me about 8 o'clock that morning.
And asked, what do you think about this mysterious spacecraft that's following your comet?
And what did you say?
Say what?
Say what?
I'm sure.
And I started getting phone calls and emails all day long from all over the place asking my opinion of this thing.
I thought, well, let's see what's going on here.
So I was finally, some of the local media folks around here kind of pointed me where this was coming from.
I finally was able to look at Mr. Schrammick's webpage and that pretty much told me everything I needed to know except for the fact that I hadn't seen the image itself.
Finally, I was able to track down a copy of that image and I pretty much recognized immediately what it was.
I could tell right away it was a bright star that was in the field.
But to me, it's not enough just to say, well, it's a bright star because I said so.
dug up what's called the Palomar Sky Survey, has been digitized and put on the World Wide
Web, and I went ahead and got on the web, downloaded a copy of that same part of the
sky, was able to match the stars in Mr. Shremek's image with the star field on the Palomar Sky
Survey, and sure enough there is a very bright star in the exact same position as his object.
How did he manage to get that Saturn-like appearance, what appeared to be rings, when
other stars in the same image didn't have them?
Why would that have occurred?
Because there's by far the brightest star in that image.
The other stars that are in his image are quite a bit dimmer than that.
And essentially, once you start overexposing any stellar image on an astronomical photograph, you start to get what are called diffraction effects.
If you look at that exact same field on the Palomar Sky Survey image, That I was just referring to, you will also see diffraction spikes in the very same star.
Again, because the star image is overexposed.
And it's just a common effect, it's due to the optics inside the telescope itself.
Then there were kind of a series, the Courtney Brown image aside from them, there were a series of other images that seemed to beg questions, one from Japan and so forth and so on, that seemed to show anomalies of varying sorts, and I'm sure you You were presented with those, or saw them?
Actually, I kind of ignored them.
Ignored them?
Yeah, because I knew that this object was a star, and the whole thing started because the object was a star, and people were starting to see various things and various images.
So, I was actually out of town during most of this.
Alright, Comets are said, now this is mythology and legend and Native American lore, but obviously Comets are said to be harbingers of change.
And I'm sure you get a lot of that.
Could there, you know, at the basis, at the bottom of a lot of what is called myth, there's some grain of truth.
And, let's see, comets as harbingers of change, where might such a myth have come from?
Actually, it's not that hard to understand.
Put yourself back in the shoes of someone who's living, say, five or six hundred years ago.
The people then were familiar, of course, with the normal lifetime star patterns that they saw and that we see today.
They were familiar with the planets.
They knew the planets moved against the background stars, but people had known of the planets for centuries at a time.
Their motions were understood.
Now imagine, here's this bright, impressive comet.
You yourself are well aware of how impressive Nailbop has been.
Oh, yes.
So imagine something like this kind of appearing almost from out of nowhere sometimes.
being this bright, impressive, beautiful object hanging around in the sky,
moving against the background stars like the planets do, but maybe in parts of the sky where the planets don't go,
like Kale-Bob is doing right now, and then fading off back into nowhere, say, a couple of
months later.
I think it was only natural to associate that event in the sky
with anything that was happening on Earth.
Now, if you think about it, there's always something rotten happening on Earth.
That's true.
There's always a war.
Rulers always die.
There's an assassination.
There's a plague or an earthquake.
You name it.
And I think it was only natural to associate those events on Earth with the comet that was in the sky at that time, forgetting that two years ago, when there was no comet in the sky, there were still bad events happening, but people would make associations with the events that happened when the comet was in the sky.
Comets ended up getting this bad rap.
Well, maybe it's a little like the virgins tossed into the volcano business.
Volcanoes erupt, and then eventually they stop erupting.
And if you throw a virgin in, when they stop, you might conclude, therefore, that the virgin stopped the volcano.
Right.
Same theory?
Yeah.
I mean, I've had somebody point out to me, kind of tongue in cheek, You know, comets are associated with the death of rulers sometimes.
That's always been one of the things that comets are supposed to foretell.
Hale-Bopp is in the sky.
Deng Xiaoping just died.
Yes, he did.
Now, the fact that he was 90-something may or may not have had anything to do with that.
That's right.
Listen, we're heard all over the world, and I've got a fax here that says, Hi Art, Mark from Sydney, Australia.
Do you know, or could you please ask Alan, whether I can see comet Hale-Bopp in the southern skies?
So, what about somebody way down in Australia?
Okay, right now he is out of luck.
Oh.
Hale-Bopp right now is strictly a Northern Hemisphere object.
But do not despair too much.
After the comet has rounded the Sun in early April, it starts to head south very quickly.
We, in our latitudes, will lose it, oh, around the 22nd, 25th of May, because it's heading south.
Meanwhile, our good friends, like Mark and Sydney, We'll start to pick up the comet very low in their northwest, about the beginning of May, and as the weeks progress, it will get higher in the southern hemisphere sky, and should still be fairly bright at that time.
However, it is, at that point, leaving the proximity of the Sun, right?
Right.
So, it's going to be fading, and it will probably have faded some by that point, but it should still be a fairly bright and impressive object, and in fact, going back to a comment I made a little bit earlier, It's after the comet has gone around the sun.
It's one of those times when you have your best tail development.
So they may actually have a very impressive object.
Maybe not quite as bright as what we had in early April, but may actually have a fairly decent tail, bright tail associated with this thing.
Are you tempted to want to fly to Australia and see it from there?
I am working on a trip to do just that.
I may actually get to meet Mark from Sydney.
I see.
I've been to Australia several times.
It's a lovely place and I look for any excuse I can to go there.
Well, that's a good one.
All right.
What is the best viewing time for us, and does it vary in the U.S.
from where we are in the Southwest, say, to the Northeast Corridor or Florida?
Does it vary at all?
Not really.
It's because the comet's basically visible in the same location from anywhere near Earth.
As the Earth turns, obviously, the hours are different depending on where you're located, whether North America or Europe or wherever.
Right now, the comet, as you know, is a morning object.
Although it is far enough north now that it is starting to become visible in the evening sky during dusk, but very, very low in the northwest.
I've not seen it myself, but I've got mountains in that direction.
I don't have a good horizon in that direction.
By when would you say it will be a good evening object?
It should start becoming Fairly easily visible in the evening by the 22nd, 23rd of March or so, maybe a little before that.
The closest point to Earth will be how many miles?
122 million.
122 million miles?
Which is 1.3 times as far away as the Sun is.
What would have happened if the comet had been, say, as close as Hyakutake came?
Oh, that would be wonderful.
If the comet had actually been closest to the sun in early December instead of beginning of April, it would have come as close to the Earth as Comet Yakutaki did around January 3rd of this year.
And it would have been impressive, to say the very least, to make a major understatement.
It would definitely have been certainly brighter than the planet Venus by far.
It may have had a tail which stretched a good halfway all the way across the sky.
Oh my goodness.
It would have been a stupendous sight.
Are we likely to get, you know it's impossible to say I suppose, but are we likely to get another comet as neat as Hale-Bopp is right now in our lifetime?
It's possible.
Great comets tend to come about once every ten years or so on the average.
We had comet West in 1976, which was a beautiful object in the
morning sky.
And then we didn't really have anything for 20 years, and then comet Yaguchake came by a year ago.
Although that was really more of an ordinary comet, which just happened to come very close to the Earth,
and we were able to view the tail in such a way as to have a phenomenally long tail across the sky.
But by my definition, that was certainly a great comet.
Okay, well, one of the things that I remember about that comet, and I try to follow these things from a layman's point of view, I found it very interesting, they said, ooh, surprise, surprise, Hayakazaki is emitting X-rays.
Um, why would a comet emit x-rays?
That is a good question.
We really don't know for sure.
That was kind of a, that was a definite surprise.
And we still, although, now let me make a disclaimer here.
I'm not exactly an expert on all the different emissions here, I think, which come from comets, although I do know a fair amount about it.
Um, my understanding is we still don't really have a mechanism yet for what is causing the x-rays to be emitted.
And for a while I thought we might just be seeing reflections of The sun's X-ray emission, which the sun doesn't give off X-rays.
We might be seeing reflections.
I understand that there's been some observations since then which kind of tend to refute that.
One of the interesting things is that once the X-rays were found in Comet Hyakutake,
some researchers went back and looked through some old data taken by some of the X-ray satellites
like Rosat and a couple of the others and identified X-ray emission in some older comets
which have been by over the past several years.
But no one had really thought to look for it.
So, in other words, it's likely this is a regular occurrence and nothing specific to the Higher Kanaka?
Right.
And although I don't believe anyone's detected X-rays in Hale-Bopp yet, I don't think anyone's looked for it yet.
I know there are proposals out there and plans to look for X-rays.
All right, this may be out on a limb time here, but I'll ask you about it.
There are a lot of people who have theories about an energy that is in space, here, all around us.
They call it zero-point energy, and that an object traveling through space, a mass traveling through space, would interact with this energy And could that be one explanation for a source of energy to produce the emission of x-rays?
Well, I'm not really sure I can comment on that because I'm not really familiar with the idea.
I kind of tend to discount it.
Would not the Earth do the same thing?
Yes.
Would not the Sun produce energy because the Sun itself is traveling through space?
Yes, I would think so.
Yeah.
Of course, we do know the sun gives off x-rays, but that's due to processes going on within its atmosphere, which
causes that to happen.
Well, if it's a snowball, and there's water and there's various things, it's just hard to imagine where x-rays
would come from.
They're a very short wavelength.
Yeah, it probably has to do with some of the ionization processes that are going on.
Again, as these substances like the water, some of the other substances like carbon monoxide and these other volatiles that I was talking about, as they ionize, we may be seeing an ionization effect, but I'm just kind of speculating in the dark right here, so don't put too much... Oh, that's fine.
Oh, look, this is the home of that.
Feel free.
What do you think of the idea?
Of a space mission.
We don't seem to have many space goals these days anymore.
Unfortunately.
You know, that's right.
I agree.
To land on a comet.
I think it would be fascinating as it has been investigated in some of the better science fiction novels I've read.
I think it would be fascinating to really get a first hand look at what's going on on some of these things and actually seeing these eruptions of material going on and what have you.
I think it would be fascinating.
I mean, I've read a couple of Science fiction novels where that theme has been addressed when Halley comes around again in the year 2061.
Could it be done?
It certainly could be.
The question is, do we have the willpower to do so?
The political will and the money, that's an entirely different question.
Yes, it is.
Are you saddened as I am by the great pullback that we've made since the Apollo days?
I would certainly have to say that I am.
Of course, I'm giving away a secret here, but I was 11 years old when Armstrong and Aldrin, it's early in the morning here, walked on the moon, and of course I was raised, I was in elementary school during the 60s, and of course this was after Sputnik, which kind of scared the pants off of the Americans.
Sure did.
And of course that kind of fed the whole Apollo project to begin with, and I remember watching the Gemini flights.
and the early Apollo flights.
And of course I do remember very vividly watching about the Apollo 11 mission on the black and white TV
we had in Alamogordo at the time.
And I really had every reason to believe that I was looking at a preview of my own future.
And I thought, gee, when I'm those guys' age, I'm going to be doing things far better than they were.
But it's like it's skipped a generation.
Yeah, in fact, I am right now, I'm about a month or two older than Neil Armstrong was when he was walking on the moon.
I've got about another month to go and I'll catch up with the age that Buzz Aldrin was at when he was walking on the moon.
Obviously, we're not there.
I think it's been very frustrating.
I think there's been a major pullback in a lot of ways, certainly science education, I think, the way science is being funded in this country.
It's a large discussion here.
It's a very deep subject and there's certainly a lot of things.
Was not really science-driven, it was politically driven.
Well, that's true.
Yeah, it was driven by politics.
Beat the Russians.
I mean, that was the whole goal of Apollo, was beat the Russians.
And we got a lot of tremendous good science from Apollo, but that was not the reason it was done.
There also was a news story in the last couple of days, just in case we do happen to go back to Mars, and we're making some attempts now, and collect samples, that those samples, on return, would have to be quarantined, because they're worried about Infection of Earth by some microbial agent from Mars.
Is that a prudent thing to do?
I believe it is.
It would seem unlikely, but again, it goes back to the fact that when we're talking about life, we have a sample of one to work with.
And you can't do very good statistics from a sample of one.
So we really have no idea how Any potential life form that would arise in another environment would interact with the life forms we have here on Earth.
So it's prudent to be careful.
Right.
All right, Doctor, we're at the bottom of the air.
So we'll wait a minute.
When we come back, I'm going to ask you about that movie Asteroid and the research you've done on close Earth objects.
This is CBC.
As part of his bio, I noted earlier when I read it, it indicates he is also interested
in the present efforts to identify potential Earth-impacting asteroids and comets, and
is currently engaged in initiating a search program for these objects to be conducted
from southern New Mexico, and which will include participation by school students and the general
In other words, lots of eyes.
And, Alan, did you happen to see the movie Asteroid Alan, are you there?
Hello, Alan.
Oh boy, I've lost Alan.
Okay, well, I warned him at the beginning of the program that such a thing could occur.
So, what I'm going to have to do is what I do when things like this happen is get him back on the line.
So if you all stand by a moment, we will retrieve Dr. Hale and I'll be right back.
Good thing that they treat somebody with a last name like Bell better than they do me, but we got cut off.
Anyway, I think we're back together again, Dr. Hale?
Yep.
Okay, good.
I'm sure you missed what I said, which is a shame.
What I was saying was that in your bio, you have begun a project looking for objects, comets, asteroids, that might impact with Earth, and you're getting school children and so forth, and the American public involved in that.
And I'm all for that.
Did you see the movie Asteroid?
Yes, I did.
I expected to get some questions about it, so I plunked myself down in front of the tube for a few hours and watched it.
OK.
So did I. And I thought, by the way, it started out, at least dramatically, very well.
And by the time that movie was over, had I been there, I'd have stepped on that little kid's hands and let him drop into the crater.
I was so angry at him.
I mean, it's like he went on a straight beeline for the ground zero impact point.
I was so angry.
Anyway, obviously there are things out there that could impact Earth.
We've had a few close calls, and I've been doing talk radio a long time, Doctor, and I remember several years ago hearing several reports about, guess what folks, scientists just announced that two days ago we had a very, very close call with an object.
We heard about it two days after it passed our orbit, near Earth.
What are the chances that in our lifetimes, in our lifetimes, something or another pretty big will hit Earth?
It depends on the size of the object.
If you're talking something that's 10 meters, 15 meters.
We've had two hits this century that we know of, both were in Siberia.
If we're talking larger objects, say 100 meters or so, I'm pulling a number out of the air here, but perhaps every few thousand years we'll have something like that, or maybe even a longer timescale than that.
The object which made the meteor crater near Flagstaff, Arizona was made about 49,000 years ago, and that was about 100 meters in diameter, at least that's what Gene Shoemaker tells me.
If we're talking about big objects that are a few miles in diameter, All right.
really wipe us out as far as life forms here on the earth.
We're probably talking about something which happens over timescales of many millions of
years if not tens of millions of years.
Cretaceous-Tertiary impact was 65 million years ago and that seems to be the last really
significant impact.
So the chances of something like that happening in our lifetime are probably very remote,
but it's not zero.
All right.
Let's say for the sake of conversation that we identified something.
That was headed our way, as in the movie Asteroid.
In the movie Asteroid, I was quite surprised.
The first time they just let this sucker come in and do what it did to Kansas City, and then they finally decided to act when they saw the second big one.
If something the size of that second one were headed toward us, would what they did be a viable alternative?
That is, blowing it to smithereens, they thought.
Yeah, you're not going to blow it to smithereens.
The best you could probably do is break it into a few smaller fragments, say a half dozen or so.
What you do, I think, depends entirely on how much lead time you have.
If we have some decent survey efforts going on, of which we're starting to initiate some now, we may very well have a 50 or 100 year warning.
Oh, really?
That's something.
Once you've identified an object and you calculate its orbit, you can compute its orbit for an indefinite period of time in the future.
All right.
I've never been shot with a bullet, but I am told that when you are, You never hear the rifle shot from the bullet that hits you, and the asteroids might be a little bit like that, ones that are headed directly for you.
Are they harder to see?
If something is coming directly towards you, yes, it would be pretty difficult to see, simply because the way we detect asteroids is we detect their motion against the background stars.
If there's something coming directly at you, it's kind of hard to see that.
In other words, there is no relative horizontal motion?
There's not much to speak of.
So the idea, of course, is you want to find them ahead of time, before that really happens.
Plus, an asteroid is a big, just black rock, and space is black, and I know that may be oversimplified, or is it?
That's oversimplified because the moon is a fairly black object.
But it does reflect sunlight.
It's true.
But I don't remember the exact percentage here, but I think it's something like... It's less than 10%, maybe as low as 4% of the sunlight that goes on the moon.
The moon is still a bright object in our sky.
You know something about our space program?
If there were an object out there, let's say we had weeks of warning, several weeks of warning might be reasonable.
Are we, and it occurred right now, today we found it.
Would we be able to do anything significant about it?
Probably not.
If you had years of warning, you could go out and perhaps stick a little rocket engine on the thing and give it a bit of a nudge.
If you give it a bit of a nudge now, 50 years from now, that nudge makes a big difference.
If on the other hand you have a few weeks of warning, there's probably not much you can do Theoretically, you could maybe launch a few nuclear warheads at the thing.
What's going to happen is you're going to break into a few smaller fragments.
So you have a choice.
Do you want one real big object coming at you?
Do you want a half dozen smaller ones coming at you?
Is there a big difference?
In other words, would one larger object be a total planet killer?
If you divided that into six objects, then are you better off Or does it just take out more cities on more continents?
A large object hitting you, say a six mile across object, would probably be a planet killer, at least in terms of those significant life forms on the planet.
A smaller object that we're talking about may wreak havoc over part of a continent, as it were.
So you'd have, say, a half dozen hits, some of them which would be in water, which would create tidal waves and wipe out a few coastal areas and coastal cities.
So if we had an object a few weeks out right now, and you were the one in charge of what to do about it, what would you do?
Oh, wait, you're going to put that responsibility on my shoulders?
Sure!
Well, if I had the ability to do that, I would probably opt to go ahead and try to break it into smaller fragments.
At least it would have some survival that way, I think, whereas you'd have almost a certain planet-wide catastrophe if the whole object hit its one piece.
So, if you discount the last, ugly, dramatic half of that movie, the premise of the movie wasn't all that far off, then?
In some respects, no, because the threat is there.
On the other hand, the way the asteroids got here, the comet perturbing their orbits, that's completely absurd.
Oh, it is?
Yes.
Oh, I was going to ask about that.
Yeah.
A comet does not have enough mass to do anything like that.
Comets have kind of been described in one way as about as close to nothing as you can get and still be something.
I mean, the mass that these things have is almost negligible.
Well, let's try the question the other way around, though.
It does, the orbit of the comet does become influenced by planets and suns and so forth, does it not?
Yeah, yeah.
The orbit was changed somewhat when it came by Jupiter a year ago.
So, yes, the planet's gravity does affect the comets.
Is there a chance that the orbit of Comet Hale-Bopp or some other large comet could be perturbed in an annoying way from our point of view?
By one of the large planets, yes.
It's certainly possible.
I mean, look what happened with Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Jupiter.
Yes.
Yes.
All right.
A number of questions for you by fax, and then we'll get to phones at the top of the hour.
At what speed You know, I get that question all the time, and I never really sit and bother to try to figure that out.
The speed will change depending on where it is in its orbit.
The closer it gets to the sun, the faster it's moving.
The further away from it, the slower it's moving.
Right now, it is slightly beyond the Earth's distance from the sun.
So it's moving at slightly less than the Earth's orbital velocity.
The Earth is moving at 18 miles per second in its orbit around the Sun, if I remember the numbers correctly.
So right now, I put the figure for Hale-Bopp at 12 to 15 miles per second.
That's the number I'm pulling out of the air.
Oh, that's really fast.
When it's closest to the Sun at the beginning of April, that will increase to, I believe, 26 miles per second.
And it'll start to slow down again.
Are there any estimates on how much mass Hale-Bopp is losing per unit of time?
Oh, I've seen some of those, and off the top of my head, I don't have those.
It's in the number of several tons per second.
Several tons?
I believe it is.
Don't quote me on that.
It's somewhere around that.
But by our standards, you know, you just heard me say that a comet is supposed to be nothing that you can get and still be something.
That's on a planetary standard.
By our own standards, a comet is still a massive object, certainly something like that.
Figures like that and still lose a very tiny percentage of its mass.
Oh, so as it goes round and round, eventually, if it is all ice, someday it'll just be gone?
Or is there a core to it?
No, that pretty much is the core.
There's ice, there's dust, there's organic materials and all sorts of junk.
It's kind of a mixture of all this junk going through space.
But yes, every time a comet goes around the sun, it loses its material, loses some of it,
which never comes back to it.
So you give a comet going around the sun enough times, and eventually it loses all its molecules
and it disintegrates.
We've seen this happen several times.
In fact, it happened rather dramatically with a comet that appeared last fall.
We saw this comet come in, actually came bright enough
to be visible to the naked eye briefly, but apparently it was a very tiny object.
And as it came around the sun, That was it.
It got used up and... Yeah.
There was nothing left once it came back from around the sun.
There was nothing there.
Alright.
There have been reports of radio emissions.
And I'm not now talking about the unambiguous intelligent signals that once said to be coming from it.
I'm talking about, in the spectrum, certain radio emissions.
Is that accurate, have you heard that?
Yes, and almost all objects in space emit radio waves.
The sun, Jupiter, numerous stars and so on, and comets as well.
In fact, as the comet is getting closer to the sun and starts to feel sun's heat, we have some physical and chemical activity going on.
And some of the emissions that we see are actually in the radio part of the spectrum.
In fact, it was observations in that part of the spectrum which were the first indications we had that it was carbon monoxide that was giving and producing activity.
We detected carbon monoxide lines in the radio part of the spectrum.
Can you tell us what part of the radio spectrum those emissions were most easily observed in?
Oh boy, I don't have that off the top of my head.
I believe it was in What we would almost call the microwave part of the spectrum.
If any of my astronomy friends are hearing me, they might be groaning because I just honestly don't have the information in my head right now.
But it's somewhere, I think, in the neighborhood of a few gigahertz.
Okay, I was going to guess at 2 plus gigahertz somewhere.
It's somewhere in that ballpark, I believe.
Alright, so your forecast for this comet, and this surprised me when we talked the other day.
I had thought that around April 1st, at the latest, it would be at its brightest.
But that is not necessarily so, and the truth is, you said, it could continue to brighten through April.
Is that right?
Through part of April.
My feeling is, its brightest will probably be right at the, near the very beginning of April.
It may start to fade slowly, although with, who knows, the Guineas Comets do weird things from time to time.
But the tail development will probably be better towards the middle of April.
I'm kind of assuming here the comet is going to behave like a typical comet.
Of course, it will be dangerous after a while.
But the comet should be a brilliant object at least through the end of April.
It will actually still be bright, although fading by May and June still.
All right.
We will not pass, or will we, through the orbit of Hilbob?
No.
The comet is in orbit.
It's almost perpendicular to the Earth's orbit, and it's well above the Earth's orbit right now.
It will pass through the plane of the Earth's orbit in early May, and that is a point outside the Earth's orbit, and we're quite a ways away from it at that time.
Again, if the comet had been closest to the sun in early December, we'd be at those respective close points at the same time, but that's the way it goes.
Would there be, if we passed through its tail, or the tail of any comet, would there be a resultant meteor shower or a shower of any sort?
Probably not.
The tail is very, very thin and we would probably not see much of anything that we have past
comet tails from time to time through history.
I don't think we've had any unusual effects.
But now this dust that is being blown off tends to follow the comet in its orbit and
if we intersect that orbit from time to time we do see meteor showers.
There's the famous Perseid meteor shower we encounter every August, which is due to a
comet that comes by every 130 years or so.
And that's just dust grains that have been ejected and they just fall around the comet's orbit.
There's the famous Leonid meteor shower, which is associated with a comet that returns every 33 years.
And this seems to be a very tight clump, a swarm of dust that follows the comet by a year or two.
The comet was last around in 1965.
We had a tremendous meteor shower the following year.
And that comet is due back in 1998.
We may have another very tremendous shower in November of 1999, or possibly 1998, possibly 1999, possibly not at all, but we'll have to wait and see.
Alright, here's another one for you.
We talked about an impact on Earth of a comet or an asteroid.
What about something that just is a real close miss, and by close I mean something that wouldn't hit the Earth, but would in effect just go knifing right through its atmosphere?
Okay.
What would happen?
We actually had an occurrence of that in the early 1970s.
An object that's probably about 5 meters in diameter, which isn't all that big really, seems to have entered the Earth's atmosphere at a very shallow angle.
kind of was passing south to north over the western United States.
It got to within about 60 miles of the Earth's surface, I believe over Montana.
And I think they've got some video of that.
Oh yeah, there's some dramatic video of that.
This was in the middle of the afternoon.
It was apparently a brilliant object.
And then just kind of scooted off back into space.
Ooh.
It didn't do anything to the Earth other than turn some people's attention toward this thing.
What about something, say, a mile or so wide?
doing the same thing with something the size of a hillbop doing that
Oh boy, that's an interesting question.
I'm not sure I can give the best answer to that.
Certainly something past, let's say Hale-Bopp's 25 miles in diameter, let's work that figure, and it passes 60 miles from the Earth, it would probably create a lot of heat, a lot of friction, and could produce a few forest fires over good parts of the Earth.
It would not be the complete devastation that we had, say, with the Cretaceous-Tertiary
impact, but there would definitely be some effects, at least in the area under which
it passed.
We would regard it as a bad day.
We would regard it as a bad day, especially if you were in the area under which it passed.
You'd probably be holding your breath, because I'm not sure we'd be able to predict its path
that accurately ahead of time.
We would certainly be seeing this as a possibility of an impact, and would hold our breath, seeing
if it really did or not.
By the way, and this has got to be a quick answer because we're at the top of the hour, but in the movie Asteroid, they predicted that it was going to whack Kansas City.
And I was sitting there thinking, you know, they can't even properly predict when satellites are, where they're going to impact, and they missed that by continent-size margins.
Was that unrealistic that it would hit Kansas City?
I think we'd be able to say, be able to identify a hemisphere.
All right.
Very good.
A hemisphere.
All right.
We'll be right back.
Dr. Alan Hale is my guest.
Yes, stay right there.
Mexico, generally pretty good viewing country for a hillbop.
And it occurred to me, doctor, the one thing I haven't asked you yet is a good layman's explanation for everybody out there on how to go find Hale-Bopp in the morning.
Okay.
That's actually pretty easy.
What you do is Around 4.30 or 5 o'clock in the morning, let's pick 4.30, good round even time.
Go out, look in the northeast, somewhat above the horizon in the northeast, and you don't have to do anything else.
You will see it.
It is the brightest, just about the brightest object in the entire sky right now.
I think Mars may be brighter, and Jupiter's brighter.
That's about it.
Otherwise, you cannot miss it.
That's right.
It is a very serious item.
How do you think That the present brightness in the morning sky will compare to the best moment in the evening sky when it moves.
If it continues to behave itself, that is an if, it should still be quite a bit brighter when we see it in the evening toward the end of this month and early April than it is right now.
We still have quite a ways to go.
Wow.
People are never going to forget this.
And you.
Then we'll go to the phones.
Let me ask you about that.
You are forevermore going to be associated with this comet and known by this comet.
How do you feel about that?
It's an interesting feeling.
Of course, I still have a life to work with and live for the next several years and some of the work I do with the Southwest Institute and everything.
I assume on balance, though, it is an advantage.
Oh, certainly.
I guess one of the neatest impressions for me is that we know from studying the comet's orbit that it will be back in about 2,400 years.
2,400 years.
Which means if you want to see it, you better see it now.
It's a long wait before you get a chance to see it again.
Any idea how many times she's been around?
At least once.
At least once.
Yeah.
And that was about 4200 years ago, and the reason that's different from the 2400 figure I just gave you is I mentioned a little while earlier that it passed close to Jupiter last year on its way in, and that shortened its orbit for a period somewhat.
Are we able to predict where it will cross next time?
It will come in on pretty much the same orbit that it came in this time, so...
All right.
Well, I could go on asking questions forever, but I'm not going to.
I'm going to turn it to the audience.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
Where are you, please?
Hi, I'm Bob from Minneapolis.
Good morning, Dr. Hale.
Good morning.
I have an interest in comets, and I'd like to ask you a question, basically, a little about cometary theory.
Did the impact of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter last year, the many pieces that were all strung out, would that be a result of a single nucleus being broken up by the gravitational forces on its previous orbit, or could that possibly be a demonstration of Thomas Van Flandern's theory that the nucleuses may be composed of many pieces that are all gravitationally attracted to each other?
Oh, good question!
I'm not extremely familiar with the Van Flandern idea.
I think that's a fairly old one, which at least some of the more recent observations seem to have thrown out specifically the Giotto flyby of Halley back in the mid-1980s.
The feeling about Shoemaker-Levy 9 is that this was a single object.
It has been in orbit around Jupiter since the early 1920s, and I'm kind of pulling these years out of the top of my head here, and on its Previous close approach to Jupiter in July of 1992, it passed close enough to Jupiter that the tidal effects resulting from Jupiter's gravity were in fact able to rip it into the several pieces that we saw when the comet was discovered about a year later.
A model which suggests that a comet is made up of a lot of little pieces orbiting together.
I think at this point the evidence seems to argue against that.
Again, we have not seen much, in a way, of cometary nuclei.
I guess the closest we have, again, the Giotto flyby, apparently, and the other spacecraft 11 years ago.
And also, when Comet Hyakutake came by the Earth a year ago, to my knowledge, there was only one signal that came back.
From the Goldstone and Radar Bounce Experiment.
Good answer.
Anything else, Collar?
No, I'd just like to say that for all the listeners, get out and see this comet.
It's one of the most spectacular sights you'll ever see, other than maybe a total solar eclipse.
Those two have to be the best.
Good for you.
If you're in Mongolia, about this time, well, actually in about the 20 hours from now, you will get to see both.
Wow.
I also understand that in the middle of March, there will be a nearly Full lunar eclipse.
Will that be an interesting time to view the comet?
Yes, it will, but that's on the night of the 23rd.
The 23rd?
Yeah, and the comet will be in the evening sky, although fairly low.
But we'll have an almost total eclipse of the moon, not quite, it'll be very departure.
And yes, full moons have a tendency to wipe out objects like comet tails and everything, but here we'll get a brief respite while the moon is in eclipse.
So it'll be a doubly good reason to go out and take a look-see.
Right.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
Hello.
Where are you, please?
Thank you.
Mr. Bell, this is Robert.
I'm in the San Joaquin Valley, California.
Yes, sir.
Dr. Hale, it's a pleasure, extreme honor to meet you, sir.
Thank you.
A man of history.
True.
Ordinary guy.
Well, sir, before I Ask my one question.
I feel it's an important question.
Hopefully you can help us with it.
I just want to quickly say, Mr. Bell, that I found out today that all of Japan for the past two weeks, they have been very excited.
The news is not telling us here in the U.S.
that They found, I don't know if it's a city, 260 miles of roads over in Okinawa.
You might want to check into that.
They found what, please?
They said that below the sea, off of Okinawa... I've been, oh yes, I've been hearing rumors of this for some time, and I think there was a guest on the Laura Lee Show that was talking about this, and I spent a decade of my life on the island of Okinawa, so... Yes, I know.
I'll be looking into it.
Anyway, your question?
Yes, Doctor.
With the recent addition to Hubble, I heard on news releases that they are viewing Hale-Bopp.
Do you have any information as to what actually is going on through Hubble?
All right, yes, that is a good question.
The new additions to Hubble, apparently Better Vision, able to look at different Parts of the light spectrum, or I really don't know.
Specifically the infrared.
Infrared, okay.
Yeah, that's the main installation infrared camera.
I'm not directly affiliated with the Hubble, but my understanding is that there's a certain shakedown period to test the new instruments, make sure that everything's functioning normally, and that no serious problems have developed from installing these new instruments.
And I presume, although I'm not really in the know right here,
that we're still in the middle of that shakedown period.
As far as observing Kailh Bump with Hubble is concerned right now,
we have a problem in that you don't want to take a chance on pointing this expensive, high-tech equipment at the sun
and burning out all your detectors, because you would do that immediately if you got close to
the sun.
So there are constraints on how close can we point this instrument
the sun that we don't want to take a chance of getting anything closer.
And that figure, as I understand it, is 50 degrees.
And unfortunately, Hale-Bopp is within 50 degrees of the sun right now.
In fact, has been for three or four months and will continue to be within that 50 degree forbidden zone, as it were, for another several months and does not leave that until later this year.
So when Hale-Bopp is close, we are not going to be able to point to Hubble at it?
Right.
Oh, that is sad.
It is. It would be great. Of course, we've got some interesting images of the comet coming in with Hubble.
And I'm sure, although I guess I can't speak for the scientists who are actually going to be putting their time
on this, but I'm quite sure they're going to be observing it as it
recedes.
Let me ask you, Doctor, about a rumor that's out there that after your discovery of Hale-Bopp, along with Tom Bob, and oh, I've got to ask about Tom Bob, that people went back and looked at some old plates And found Hale-Bopp from deep space photography done by large telescopes long ago.
Is there anything to that?
Yes.
Once we had a decent orbit for the comet, it was then actually a simple procedure when we knew where the comet was at past times.
And one image of the comet was identified on a photograph taken with a telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, New South Wales, Australia, in April 1993, when it was well beyond the orbit of Saturn.
I've seen that image.
In fact, I reproduced that image in the book.
And it's clearly a comet.
It's definitely a fuzzy object thing.
There.
It's clearly there.
So what's the answer?
They just didn't notice?
Right.
If you take one of these large photographs of a fairly wide field of the sky, covering quite a bit of area, there's fuzzy objects all over it.
Galaxies and so on.
Now, a comet can be noticed because during, say, a 50-minute exposure, it moves and it's trailed.
images is trailed. Well, Hillbob was so far out at that time that the trailing was negligible.
If you look at the image very carefully, you'll see that it is trailed. But someone who was
looking for a trail of a comet will be looking for something a lot longer than this.
Fair enough. So it's possible someone did see it, but passed
it off as one of the 2,000 other galaxies which show up on that same photograph.
So they could have been the discoverer, but they weren't.
All right.
In the media, you're fairly prominent, Dr. Hale.
Tom Bopp, on the other hand, is not.
I mean, Bopp is almost like a mythical character who is never seen and never heard.
Is there really a Mr. Bopp?
He's an incredibly nice guy.
He's very nice.
I had not heard of Tom.
I don't know if he'd heard of me or not prior to that infamous night.
Tom is an amateur astronomer who works and lives around Phoenix and was out with a few of his friends when he found the same little buggy object that I did at around the same time.
And we've gotten to know each other.
We've met on a few occasions.
We've done a few joint appearances and he has done a few speaking engagements on his own.
He's a quieter guy than I am.
He knows how to keep his mouth shut where I don't.
But he's actually an incredibly nice guy.
It really is going to be an interesting couple of months for you now, because I think even though the media at a gigantic level has not yet grasped this, they're about to.
Yeah, they're in the process of doing that right now.
I'm getting quite a few interviews.
I give three or four interviews a day right now.
Really?
The phone does not stop ringing and it's only going to keep getting more and more interesting.
Alright, well you haven't done it so I'm going to make you do it.
You have authored a book about this comet and I think it's called Everybody's Comet?
Yes, it is.
Tell us a little about the book.
Of course, I had to capitalize on this thing like anyone.
The next section is where do I look, how do I look, when do I look, and so on.
That's the thing that most people will probably be interested in.
I have a brief afterward where I talk about my own personal view of this thing, what this has meant to me, what I'd like to do with this.
Again, this is a very personal thing.
Then I've got a few appendices, various other sources of information, a timeline.
I had to use a few technical terms throughout the course of the book, although I tried to use those as little as I could.
I do have a glossary which explains anything out of the ordinary, and an appendix about some of the work I'm doing at the Southwest Institute for Space Research, at least what I'd like to do.
All right.
Where is your book available and how do they get it?
Okay, it should be available in bookstores.
I know Barnes & Noble is carrying it nationwide.
All right.
I think some of the other chain bookstores are as well.
I don't know, because I've done a couple of book sightings at a couple of these other places.
It is directly available from the publisher.
It's High Lonesome Books in Silver City, New Mexico.
They have a 1-800 number.
All right, go ahead.
Let's hear it.
1-800-380-7323.
That's off the top of my head.
I'm about 98% certain that that's correct.
Oh boy, it better be correct.
Well, I can go double check real quick.
At the bottom of the hour break here, you better check.
I can do that right now while we're talking.
All right.
You know, you sort of stopped when you got toward the end there and you said I wrote about what this comment means to me.
So that sounds like an awfully good question.
Phones, I'm coming to you in a second.
Hold tight.
The question is, Doctor, you know, on a personal level, what does this mean to you?
It's given me a chance to actually make a career out of science.
I guess if I could put it in a nutshell.
I think we talked about this a little bit earlier.
I was one of those who was inspired by Apollo and so on to go pursue a career in science.
There were quite a few of us in our generation that were inspired to do just that.
We went through all the rigors of college and majoring in one of the sciences and going through graduate school.
Let me tell you, graduate school is no picnic.
It's definitely a lot of work.
If this turns out to be your legacy, and we'll all end up with some sort of legacy, whatever we're remembered for, it wouldn't be that bad, would it?
No, it would not.
Certainly getting a name on something like this.
Of course, I'm still approaching this with the idea that I've got, I'd like to make another 30 or 40 years of my life left.
And there's other comets out there.
Well, I've got something I want to do.
I formed this organization, the Southwest Institute for Space Research, about three and a half years ago for the very pragmatic reason that there are no jobs for scientists these days.
In fact, I really can't encourage any student to pursue a career in science because the employment prospects are so bad.
Oh, that's awful.
It is, and a lot of us were inspired by Apollo, but as you pointed out, there's been this major cutback, a step backwards kind of as I look at it.
Yet in a society that is more dependent upon science with each passing year when you get right down to it with all the new technology and everything that is coming out, and people who don't really understand how science operates, and so I think it's all been tied up in the fact that there's very little work for a person that goes to college and wants to contribute to our knowledge about the universe.
And it's not just astronomy, it's a lot of science.
Well, here, let me tell you my situation.
I've been an electronics microwave all my life.
And when I began with electronics, those were the days when you sat down and you built your own gear and you went out and you bought parts and you designed something or you took somebody's circuit and put it together.
Those days are long gone.
And I'm long lost in terms of present-day state-of-the-art electronics.
And most people are.
In other words, we're down to black box technology.
If something goes wrong, you either throw it away or pull a module, if it's worth enough, and replace a module.
But you don't understand how you fixed it.
And that seems to have been what's happened to science.
There's very little room anymore For the layman, it's very, very specialized.
Is that occurring across the spectrum?
Somewhat.
I mean, I can only offer a perspective on astronomy, I guess.
Astronomy is actually one place where the amateur, as it were, can make contributions.
I mean, we do have CCDs available these days, and there are actually quite a few amateur astronomers who are making quite a few good contributions and discoveries.
I can't really speak for some of the other sciences.
So you would encourage somebody to become an amateur astronomer, but not necessarily pursue a full career in science?
I would love to be able to do that, but with the employment prospects currently being what they are, no, I cannot.
God, that's sad.
Yeah.
So that's kind of why I went and formed this organization.
I wanted to have a career in science, and by golly, I'm going to have one, one way or another.
Well, so, in a lot of ways, you've got a lot to thank this comet for.
Absolutely!
All right, hold on, and I promise, I promise we'll lay into the phones when we get back.
So, if you have a question for Dr. Alan Hale, co-discoverer of this incredible comet, coursing through the cold space above us, come now.
Trooper, I know it's an hour later there, so it's going to be I would guess you are a night person.
Yeah, a spacey guy has to be I think.
That's right.
That's the time that you have to be out working.
When you have the time, are you generally up into the middle of the night?
Usually, I usually work better that way anyway.
But of course I'm up in the day a lot too.
That's when I interact with the rest of society.
I spend a lot of time in front of the computers.
Very much like my life, actually.
All right.
East of the Rockies, I promised.
To the phones, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hill.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
This is Mark from Collinsville, Illinois, on Tech Talk.
Hello, Mark.
Hello, Art.
I just came in from the outdoors.
I set my binoculars up, so excuse my shaking.
It's very cold outside.
Oh, it is, yes.
I let my binoculars adjust.
Mr. Hale, I have a few quick comments, or in fact one comment and several quick questions.
If I may, with no disrespect to your discovery, Mr. Hale, I would like to suggest to you that this comet has already been named from its possible appearance in the middle of the second millennium B.C.
Well, with no disrespect intended, I'm sure, he is Dr. Hale.
Dr. Hale, yes, and there were many worldwide accounts of a great comet that fit Well, it's been out there since 1950.
Would you care to cite the source of this?
or challenge everybody to do their homework.
All you gotta do is go to Pete's office.
And another question, could you explain?
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Let him respond to that.
You're saying that it's no new deal.
Well, it's been out there since 1950.
1950, all right.
Doctor?
Would you care to cite the source of this?
Well, Emanuel Velikovsky, for one.
Okay, I have a tendency to discount works of Balakoski.
He had a lot of ideas which have since been shown to have been unverified.
The idea that, for example, I think that Jupiter emits comets.
Well, yes, I agree with that.
But his accounts from the middle of the second millennium are not myth.
They're actually oral tradition and rock art and whatnot of a worldwide catastrophe.
Well, he just explained that.
Did you not, Doctor?
or or terror uh... the raging bull which is common is that the two horns is is is and it was
leaders discussion of it writing from the east and going bright and heading
north and but i would just about to look into it a minor question
is could you explain why never have cut off pictures
from hobble since october ninety five well he just explained that uh... did you
not doctor yes in fact that there's a Hubble images from as recently as October 1996.
What about the work of Sitchin, Zacharias Sitchin?
Any comments?
I'll be truthful, I have not read it, but I have read critiques of some of his work and I have a tendency to disbelieve that type of thing.
I don't really necessarily see the evidence.
There, again, I've not necessarily read the work, but I've read critiques of it.
Maybe I shouldn't overblow that too much.
As far as a previous return of Hale-Bopp, yes, we do know that it was around once before, unless there's a specific amount of positional information which could identify an object as this comet.
There are lots of comets.
Comets with two tails happen all the time.
Almost every comet that comes close to the Sun develops two tails.
Really nothing unusual.
And we don't have the name of the guy who might have seen it the last time it was around.
And the tradition of naming comets for the discoverers goes back two centuries, not millennia.
The orbit we have tells us that Hale-Bopp was around 4,200 years ago.
My understanding is that there has been one record of a comet from the year, I believe, 2192 B.C.
But that there's not enough information, at least at this point, to tell us whether or not that's a record of Hale-Bopp or whether it's a record of one of the other great comics that certainly must have been around at that time.
All right, Doctor.
I would be remiss if I did not ask you the following question, and that is...
You spend a lot of time looking at the sky.
A lot of people don't.
They look straight ahead, they drive, they don't look at the sky, so they don't see things.
But you're a guy who's looked at the sky for a long time.
There has been a UFO flap going on in this country since Roswell or before.
And with all the time that you've looked at the sky, have you ever seen anything that you just flat couldn't explain?
No.
No.
I've seen a lot of very interesting phenomena.
Just a couple of mornings ago I was actually looking at Hale-Bopp, which was in the Northeast, and over in the Northwest there was this brilliant sphere of light coming up from the horizon disappearing into the sky and leaving a large trail of
material behind it.
It got all twisted and everything.
It was a rocket launch from White Sands Missile Range, which is not too far from me.
Yes, we see something just like that from Vandenberg here.
And I've seen things from Vandenberg when I lived out in California.
But I've seen that, I've seen brilliant fireballs which leave trails,
which then get distorted by atmospheric winds.
I've seen lithium and barium ionization experiments conducted in the atmosphere.
Sure.
Reentering satellites.
Sure.
Auroras.
We had an aurora here a few years ago.
The whole northern part of the sky is on fire and I realize that the listeners that live
in the more northern latitudes go aurora a big deal.
Yeah, I know.
They know all about it.
I lived in Anchorage.
I saw you.
It is a big deal actually.
It's beautiful.
Yeah, here in New Mexico we get it once every few years and it was very impressive.
We had people calling in UFOs when they saw this aurora.
I've seen a lot of these very fascinating natural and man-made phenomena but I've never
seen anything that I couldn't explain.
Couldn't explain.
All right.
Now a pretty sensitive question.
You're a very mainstream kind of guy.
Now you've discovered a comet.
That goes by your name forevermore.
Very mainstream.
If you saw something, honest answer call for you, that you absolutely couldn't explain, would you report it?
Would you think real hard before you reported it from a career point of view?
I would certainly report it if there was something that I could not explain.
I mean, I have what I'd like to think is a fair amount of knowledge about the universe around me, but I certainly don't know everything.
And science as a whole does not know everything, doesn't even come close to knowing everything.
There are certainly a lot of things that we don't understand.
Right.
So I would certainly report it to my fellow astronomers and let them know, hey, I saw something.
What do you think of this?
It would depend on whether it was a one-time event.
If it was just a one-time event that never was repeated, I would kind of have a tendency to just distrust my own senses.
Ah, there you are.
That's, I guess, what I meant.
And even though you thought you saw it, or even if you were sure you saw it, if it wasn't repeatable and demonstratable, it would be career-threatening, would it not, to report it?
I don't think it would be career-threatening.
I mean, it's just the way I approach things.
I know that Our senses can sometimes deceive us.
There have been times when I have been almost sleepy and I've almost felt detached from my own body and yet it's just a state of three-fourths of sleep and my consciousness has started to slip away from me a little bit.
We can be deceived by our own senses.
We can be deceived by our own preconceived notions from time to time.
I guess it would depend upon the situation.
I mean, if I actually had photographs of the thing and some sort of records which I could show to someone else, I would certainly feel no hesitation at all about calling up some of my astronomer colleagues.
Oh, that's good.
Digital evidence.
What do you think about this?
Imagine all this.
Not quite sure what to make of it.
What do you think?
Okay.
All right.
Fair answer.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
Where are you, please?
I'm in Sacramento.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
I appreciate this, Dr. Bell.
I wanted to double check with you.
That was the Southwest Institute for Scientific Research?
For space research.
For space research.
Is there a webpage involved?
We are just putting one together.
I actually have a colleague of mine in Memphis who has put up a very temporary one.
It's very much under construction right now.
But I will certainly give you the URL for that.
Oh, yes, by all means.
Go right ahead.
That's http://www.spaceportmemphis.com.
As a colleague of mine had found a host in Memphis.
We'll be moving that to New Mexico, presumably at some point in time in the not-too-distant future.
But meanwhile, you find a host when you can.
Okay, um, are you taking now regular photographs of Hale-Bopp?
Uh, the only thing I'm doing to take photographs of Hale-Bopp is I'm sticking a 35mm camera on a tripod and opening up the shutter.
Really?
For 30 or 40 seconds.
Really?
And you can get some gorgeous pictures that way if you have a bright enough camera.
Uh-huh, instead of, uh, and see I went out and bought this, um, camera attachment for my, my Mead, and I've been so disappointed in what I saw of the Mead, That's a very, very good idea.
So, you say regular 35, what speed film?
Pretty fast.
I've been using 400 or 1000.
400 or 1000, and how long in exposure?
30 or 40 seconds.
You start getting much longer than that, you start to get trailing.
And you don't want to do that.
Alright, well that's a really good tip.
Alright, first... If I may, in my book I've got some examples of some comic photographs I've taken that way.
Okay.
In fact, I have a lovely picture of Kamehameha that I managed to take the night it came by
Wow.
the North Pole a year ago.
I was able to get away with a five minute exposure without trailing, but that's kind
of unusual.
Wow.
It depends, I guess, on the state of the atmosphere.
It depends really on how far north it is.
If it was far enough north, we might be able to start getting away with maybe full minute
exposures without getting trailing, but with the setup I just described.
Alright, well I'm out about 65 miles east of Las Vegas, in a little town called Prump Nevada, where we have very, very clear skies.
Frankly, more so to the west than the east.
Toward the east we've got a bit of a glow from the city of Las Vegas, even that far away.
But the skies out here are remarkable, and when it comes up in the west, I'm going to try exactly what you just suggested.
Okay, first time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
Hello, Art.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm calling from Prince George, B.C., Canada.
Yes, sir.
And we're getting a really nice view of this comet up here.
It's about an inch long in the sky to the naked eye.
Would the view that far north, Doctor, be any different?
It would be higher in the sky.
And from that latitude, I believe it may be circumpolar now.
It may not set.
It may stay above the horizon all night.
My caller might be able to tell me that.
Can you see it all night long?
No, it comes up about 3.30 and then it's gone about 6.
Yeah, within a week or so you will be able to see it all night long.
Right on.
All right, well, if we have the time, we would attract some calls from Fairbanks.
That's way up north.
I presume they would be able to see it all the night long.
All right, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
Good morning.
Yeah, good morning.
This is Jack from Oregon Coast.
I'm in Fogsville, unfortunately.
And good evening, or good morning, I guess, is Dr. Hale.
Good morning.
Are you related in any way to Hale's Observatory?
Uh, I don't know.
Okay.
That's a good question.
Okay.
I've never really investigated that.
Okay, well the one thing I did want to ask you, because I only had one question for you.
My mother, she's long dead now, but she was a little girl, I guess it was, back in, I don't know, somewhere between 1908 and 1915.
She remembers seeing Haley's Comet.
I guess I'm about right on the date because she was here safe for me and she said it was phenomenal back then.
Would you agree with that or would you say that it's anything like the Hale-Bopp comet?
Yeah, that's a fair question.
A comparison between Halley's then and Hale-Bopp now.
Okay.
If you were to look at the two comets under identical circumstances, Hale-Bopp is far and away larger and brighter of the two.
But, of course, We have different circumstances.
Where is the comet in relationship to the Sun and the Earth when it's closest and all that?
It is possible that your mother might have been referring to another brilliant comet that appeared in 1910 called the Daylight Comet of 1910.
It was visible during the day for a while.
Oh my!
On the other hand, Halley was very well placed in 1910.
There was a period of time when it came fairly close to the Earth.
And our viewing geometry was such that the tail stretched a significant distance across the sky.
And we put on a very good show for at least a brief period of time around that time.
So a comet could be bright enough to be visible during the day.
In fact, I have seen Hale-Bopp telescopically after sunrise.
You know, I began to wonder about that the other morning myself.
It was so bright.
That you would think.
I mean, it's not as bright as Venus, but it's getting there.
It's bright enough to see, at least telescopically, after sunrise.
I don't know if it's going to get bright enough to see with the naked eye during daylight, but there have been occasional comets that have gotten that bright, although it's usually been for a brief period of time.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hill.
Hi.
It's a very pleasure to be on the air.
Where are you, sir?
I am in Leavenworth, Kansas.
All right.
Go ahead.
Okay, what I'm doing is getting rid of my radio.
Okay, that's good.
You've got to turn the computer off, correct?
That's correct, yes.
Very good.
So, Mr. Hill.
Yes?
Isn't that a great discovery that you discovered out there?
Subjective question.
Yes, it is.
It is.
Well, I certainly consider it great from my own personal perspective.
On the great grand scheme of things, perhaps not, but it's certainly one that's getting a lot of attention right now, and I am very glad of that.
Well, I was able to observe it yesterday morning, just before sunrise.
It was in the eastern, southern part of the sky.
Southern?
It should really be more than the north.
Well, from where I was at, where I looked at it, it was just above the horizon.
Okay.
Is that the correct place to look?
By sunrise, it's actually...
Quite a ways above the horizon.
Nope.
I'm just trying to say that I saw and I know that that was Hellbottom.
Okay.
I'm pretty sure.
I know that it is, I'm pretty sure.
It did have a long tail with it.
Yes, sir.
Well, good chance it was, then.
There's nothing else, Doctor, is there, in our sky right now with a long tail?
Nothing with a long tail.
There's a couple of the planets that are fairly bright.
Jupiter's kind of low in the southeast right now during dawn, and that's bright.
Mars is over in the west at that time.
But, and Hale-Bopp is in the northeast.
Of course, the two planets are just points of light.
We're so low on time now, but I want to ask about this.
Venus, of course, is very bright.
Morning sky Venus, or evening.
If you look at it, and just stare at Venus with your eyes, there is an optical thing that begins to occur, and Venus looks very much like it's moving up and down, sideways, and all over the place, and it's some sort of optical Conclusion, I guess.
What is it that does that?
Good question.
I haven't encountered that.
It's probably just your eye, whether you know it or not, your eyelid is constantly blinking at a very fast rate.
Right, that's true.
And that's probably what you're seeing.
The eye is not an analog sampler.
Your eye is a digital sampler.
It samples things at a very phenomenal rate.
So, in other words, that... You've probably seen something associated with that.
Maybe just your eyes getting tired of staring at this object.
Sure.
The whole time.
So that may account for the many reports of that being a UFO.
Yeah, in fact, Venus is probably the most commonly reported UFO of any object.
You did acknowledge earlier in the program that there is a great likelihood that life is fairly common out there.
Are you surprised that we have not yet encountered Some serious evidence of that life in the form of radio signals or... Radio signals are the first thing that really comes to mind.
Uh, not really.
Depending on who you talk to, the chances of a life evolving some sort of sentience like we have here on Earth Some people seem to think that's likely, some people think it's not.
And again, we're dealing with a sample of one, so it's really hard to get any kind of feel for how likely that would be.
To me, though, I think the biggest detractor would be that, consider the entire lifetime of the Earth, 4.5 billion years, and consider how long of that span there has been a species that's been capable of sending out radio signals.
Not very long.
In 20 or 30 years, out of a span of 4.5 billion.
You bet.
And for us to receive that, Some other species would have to be in that kind of a span right at the exact same time we are.
And of course, we may well pass the need for that kind of communication, radiation, within another hundred years or so.
And there's no way to know that.
How typical are we?
We don't know that either.
Great.
Doctor, it has been a pleasure and I would like to have you back again and again as the comet ...does its thing over the next couple of months.
So if you would agree to that, we'd love to have you back.
We can probably work something like that.
I don't see why not.
All right.
Dr. Hale, thank you.
You're welcome.
And good night.
From the high desert, folks, a very good location to view the comet.
I want to thank Dr. Alan Hale for being here, and he will be back.
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