Dr. Alan Hale, co-discoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp (July 22, 1995), explains its massive size (25–70 km) and rare brightness—unlike Kohoutek’s fizzle—peaking mid-April despite media silence until late March. The comet’s ancient orbit (~4,200 years ago) was altered by Jupiter in 1992, and Hale debunks claims of prior documentation or Velikovsky’s theories while clarifying its safe, high-altitude pass. Though unlikely to cause global harm, even large impacts like the Cretaceous-Tertiary event could devastate life, underscoring the need for cautious quarantine of Martian samples and public comet observation during the March 23 lunar eclipse. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening.
Is Coast Coast A.M. I'm Mark Belch.
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 Hellbop 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 Almogordo, 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 the 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 and which will include participation by school students and the general public.
He, of course, is the co-discoverer of Comet Halebop.
That was in July of 1995.
And now from New Mexico and here to tell us which city will be impacted by Comet Halebop and which Pleiadium beam ship is lurking behind the comet carrying thousands of green people is Alan Hale.
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 Schramick business, and I'm sure you were upset with me over the way I handled the news or the information I received from Chuck Schramick 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, and I, you know, after the show, I go out and take a look, and this comet is nothing short of incredible.
What is going on?
Well, no, take me back.
Take me back.
I'm sure everybody wants to know to the day you discovered this comet.
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.
And there's 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.
And I had gone out that evening to look at the two comets I was following.
If you're familiar with the weather in this part of the country, you probably are.
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 go 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 a telescope towards one star cluster in Sagittarius and looked at the eyepiece, and I happened to see a little fuzzy thing nearby.
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, logged onto the computer at the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or the world's clearinghouse 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 at position, either galaxies or comets or anything.
I actually did send a tentative email to the Central Bureau telling him I had a possible comet at that point.
And then I went outside and looked through the eyepiece of the telescope and I saw beyond all doubt that the thing had moved.
Usually the large telescopes at the observatories like Kit Pape, Palma, or Mauna Kea, 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 now at this point, you think you've got a comet.
What are the odds that somebody else, the mysterious, I might add, Mr. Both and I'm going to ask you about that, would discover a comet at exactly the same time?
But since this comet was next to a fairly well-known star cluster, really anyone who was looking at that star cluster at that same time, that same night, should have seen the same object.
Well, I've got a whole series of questions about Halebop.
The first one is even some major university astronomers were puzzled that Halebop went out beyond the orbit of Venus, you know, way out there, 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 Haleba.
The comet was definitely very active and very bright.
In fact, 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.
There is factors 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 were 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.
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 fallatil 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.
We know the main constituent of a comet nucleus is water, and we're definitely too far out at that point, part of the solar system, for water to start sublimating.
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.
So 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 our minds then was, well, is this really just a carbon monoxide-rich comet?
How's the water ratio compared to carbon monoxide?
That we had to wait about a year before we really started seeing water kick in in earnest, which it did.
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.
Okay.
I take it that you've not noted any course corrections thus far with a hailbomb.
Let me tell you what I believe is for the probable start of that whole business.
Once the comet's discovered, the idea is what's its orbit.
So astronomers from around the world need to be both professional and amateur astronomers.
We'll 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?
Halebaugh 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, I guess, three or four days after its 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.
It was actually just a refinement of the orbit based on the data.
It was really almost two weeks before Brian Marshall 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.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with that contention, although I guess I have a biased viewpoint.
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 that's not getting any publicity.
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 Hailbot 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 seemed like nobody was paying too much attention to it, with a few exceptions, I guess you being one of them, until fairly recently.
Now, 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 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.
Keep in mind there's always an amount of guesswork involved.
And as my good friend David Levy, who's the Levy and Shoot Make a Levy 9, by the way, he has a quote that I really love to use.
And that's, comets are like cats.
They have tails and they do whatever they want.
And there's a lot of truth to that.
Oh, yes, there is.
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, the beginning of April.
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.
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.
True.
Also, usually a comet will have its best dust tail development after it has rounded the sun and is heading back out.
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?
So comet is, and for me 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.
And 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.
You'll probably have our longest and our brightest tail right around that time.
It seems to be the tail makes the comet more than anything else, at least to the average person.
I guess I would have said that before I saw yours or ours or whoever it belongs to.
It is spectacular.
In fact, people have no idea, those who've been too lazy so far, to get up early and lose a little sleep and go out and look.
I took my wife out, who has seen a comet or two, Aidadaki 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 to provide a better view of the common.
Okay, usually when you have a telescope, on 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 it more of the outside detail, especially when you start looking at the tails, 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.
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.
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 0.1 for bright lines.
This is similar to Komet Hayataki during the IRTF TO team 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 grain emission in the continuum intensity versus wavelength.
Organic molecules simply mean molecules which contain carbon.
There are a lot of substances which contain carbon.
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 Halley, the return of Halley 11 years ago, specifically the spacecraft flybys, like the European Space Agency's Giotto mission, detected a large number of organic molecules in and around Halley.
Okay, they are the leftovers from the days that the planets in the solar system formed about four and a half billion years, 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 formation.
You see 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 dust disk, if I said that right, in orbit around a star.
And give this pro 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 gravity than anything else, and so 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.
When we talk about the Big Bang, we're actually talking about the formation of the entire universe, which preceded us 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 positive 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.
So 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.
I mean, 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.
Although, depending on how the results are, the Martian fossils that were putatively 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.
If life got started here, life should therefore get started as long as the environmental conditions are suitable anywhere, really, not in the universe.
So my own feeling is that there is probably a lot of life throughout the universe.
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 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.
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 that 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.
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 was probably on the order of about one kilometer across.
Of course, there were 20-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?
Yeah, it would be pretty bad news for any life forms on the Earth.
The 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 Halebop.
I think the estimates that I've seen usually say something like six miles or so.
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 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, through some of the local media folks around here kind of pointing me where this was coming from, I finally was able to look at Mr. Schmavik's webpage, and that kind of pretty much told me everything I needed to know, except for the fact I hadn't seen the image itself.
And 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.
I went and 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. Schrevik'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.
Because it is 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 were presented with those or saw 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.
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 Halebop 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 the Earth.
Now, if you think about it, there's always something rotten happening on Earth.
Hailbop 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 around the 22nd, 25th of May because it's heading south.
Meanwhile, our good friends like Mark and Sidney will 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.
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 is one time 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.
It's because the comet's basically visible in the same location from anywhere in the Earth.
Just 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 have not seen it myself that, because I've got mountains in that direction.
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 Yakutake 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 have definitely 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.
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 Halebop is right now in our lifetime?
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 Yagutake 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, Hayaki is emitting X-rays.
And we still, although, now let me make a disclaimer here.
I'm not exactly an expert on all the different emissions which come from comets, although I do know a fair amount about it.
My understanding is we still don't really have a mechanism yet for what is causing the X-rays to be emitted.
For a while, it was thought we might just be seeing reflections of the sun's X-ray emission, which the Sun does give off X-rays.
We thought 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 you've been by over the past several years.
But no one had really even thought to look for it.
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 treasure.
That has been investigated in some of the better science fiction novels I've read.
I think it'd 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'd 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.
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.
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.
All right, Doctor, we're at the bottom of the air, so let's go.
Okay, okay.
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 public.
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 will all stand by a moment, we will retrieve Dr. Hale and be right back.
You would think that they treat somebody with a last name like Bell better than they do me, but we got cut off.
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 in the American public involved in that.
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 B-line 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, and 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?
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 time scale than that.
The object which made the meteor crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, was made about 49,000 years ago.
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, ones that could really wipe us out as far as the life forms here on the Earth, we're probably talking about something which happens over time scales of many millions of years, if not tens of millions of years.
Now, the 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.
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?
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 that asteroids might be a little bit like that, ones that are headed directly for you.
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.
But it only 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 light that, the sunlight that throws on the moon.
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.
Oh, well, 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.
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 is 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, and the Earth is moving at 18 miles a second in its orbit around the Sun, if I remember the numbers correctly.
So right now, I put the figure for Hailbop at 12 to 15 miles a second.
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.
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.
The truth is, you said it could continue to brighten through April, is that right?
My feeling is its brightest will probably be right near the very beginning of April.
It may start to fade slowly, although with who knows, these comets do weird things from time to time.
But the tail development will probably be better towards the middle of April.
I mean, that's, I'm kind of assuming here the comet's going to behave like a typical comet, and of course, get dangerous after a while.
But the comet should be a brilliant object at least through the end of April, at least, and we'll actually still be bright, although fading by May and June still.
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 post points at the same time, but that's the way it goes.
We actually had an occurrence of that in the early 1970s.
The object that was probably about five meters in diameter, which wasn'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.
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 miss that by continent-size margins.
Was that unrealistic that it would hit Kansas City?
Mexico, generally pretty good viewing country for Hailbop.
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 of how to go find Hailbop in the morning.
What you do is around 4.30 or 5 o'clock in the morning, let's pick 4.30, good round even time, and go out, look in the northeast, somewhat above the horizon to the northeast, and you don't have to do anything else.
You will see it.
It is about the brightest object in the entire sky right now.
I think Mars may be brighter, and Jupiter's brighter.
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 in early April than it is right now.
And a reason that's different from the 2,400 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 period somewhat.
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 Flandren's theory that the nucleuses may be composed of many pieces that are all gravitationally attracted to each other?
I'm not extremely familiar with the Van Flandren 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 geoto flyby of Halley back in the mid-1980s.
The feeling by 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.
I think at this point, the evidence seems to argue against that.
Again, we have not seen much in the way of cometary nuclei.
I guess the closest we have, again, the Giotto flyby of Hanley 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.
Yeah, that's the main installation infrared camera.
I'm not directly affiliated with 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 no serious problems have developed from installing the 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 Hill 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 even got close to the sun.
So there are constraints on how close can we point this instrument to 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, Hailbop 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.
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 for 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 Halebop, along with Tom Bopp, and oh, I've kind of asked about Tom Bopp, that people went back and looked at some old plates and found Halebop from a deep space photography done by large telescopes long ago.
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 Sighting Spring Observatory, New South Wales, Australia, in April 1993 when it was well beyond the orbit of Saturn.
If you take one of these large photographs of a fairly wide field of the sky, covering quite a bit of area, and 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.
The image is trailed.
Well, Hillbop 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.
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 bulky 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 actually, he's an incredibly nice guy.
And coping with the world pedestal that we're both kind of being put on for a while.
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, that I was one of those who was inspired by Apollo and so on to go pursue a career in science, and there were quite a few of us in our generation that were inspired to do just that.
And so we went through all the rigors of college and majoring in one of the sciences and going through graduate school.
And let me tell you, graduate school is no picnic.
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.
Yet in a society that's 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 we just, there's very little work for a person that goes through college and wants to contribute to our knowledge about the universe.
And it's not just astronomy, it's a lot of science.
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.
I mean, I can only offer a perspective on astronomy, I guess.
Astronomy has 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.
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 fits the description and orbit of Hale Bob.
I would advise everybody to or challenge everybody to do their homework.
And the tradition of naming comets for the discoverers goes back two centuries, not millennia.
The orbit we have tells us that Halebop 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 Halebop or whether it's a record of one of the other great comets that certainly must have been around at that time.
Just a couple of mornings ago, I was actually looking at Halebov, which was in the northeast, and over in the northwest, there was this brilliant spear of light coming up from the horizon, disappearing into the sky, and leaving a large trail of material behind it, which got all twisted and everything.
It was a rocket launch from White Sands Missile Range, which is not too far from me.
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 mean, it's just the way I approach things is 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, you know, I have like three-fourths of sleep, and my consciousness is starting to slip away from me a little bit.
And 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.
Instead of, and see, I went out and bought this camera attachment for my mead, and I've been so disappointed in what I saw in the mead that, oh, that's a very, very good idea.
Hailbob is 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.
Okay, well, the one thing I did want to ask you, though, is only had one question for you.
My mother, she's long dead now, but when she was a little girl, I guess it was, back in, I don't know somewhere between 1908 and 1915, she remembers seeing Halley's comet.
I guess I'm about to write on the dates because she was hearsay 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 Halebop comet?
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 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.
Depending on who you talk to, the chances of a species, 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 it would be.
To me, though, I think the biggest detractor would be that consider that 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.