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Oct. 13, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
26:40
Special Edition - Comet Ison

An Unexplained special update about Comet Ison from Colin Johnston at Armagh Planetarium, Northern Ireland...

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Hello, it's Howard Hughes in London at the Home of the Unexplained, www.theunexplained.tv.
What you're about to hear is not a regular numbered edition of The Unexplained.
It's going to be a lot shorter, but it's designed to answer some of your questions about a subject that's been troubling some people and interesting many others who've been emailing me recently, and that is Comet ISON, which is on its way here.
It's past Mars, and it's going to be heading for the Sun and then heading past us.
A lot of theories have sprung up about Comet ISON, and I wanted to try and get towards some of the truth.
And I was emailed recently by one of the top guys at Arma Planetarium in Northern Ireland, which is one of Europe's leading planetaria, Colin Johnston.
And I asked Colin if he'd come on and explain a little bit to do with the latest on Comet ISON.
So hopefully this will answer some of your questions.
And for all I know, it may spark many more.
Let me know what you think.
www.theunexplained.tv is the website.
That's how you can contact me or make a donation to the show.
And the website designed and created by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
The next show is a regular edition.
It'll be with David Paul Lidis about people who just mysteriously vanish in the wild parts of North America.
That's coming soon.
We're also due to have Linda Moulton Howe on here.
And very exciting, we might well have, and I say might well, it's not definitely confirmed, but it's looking like we're going to get the great Jesse Ventura here.
That's all coming soon.
But right now, let's get on to Colin Johnston at Armar Planetarium.
And Colin, thank you very much for doing this update with us.
Thank you for inviting me on, Howard.
It's a pleasure.
Well, it's a real pleasure to talk to you.
I think it's only my second show with somebody in Northern Ireland.
The last guy I did was a Northern Irish-American guy, and we talked about spirit voices and hauntings and stuff like that.
I mean, Northern Ireland is a fascinating land, isn't it, of all kinds of myths and legends.
Oh, it is.
It's a wonderful place.
And if any of your listeners are over this way, it's certainly worth a visit.
And they'd be very welcome to visit our map planetarium.
People have a lovely turn of phrase there.
I used to have an assistant when I worked at Capital Radio in London, Pamela.
And she was from Northern Ireland and she used to say, mind yourself.
Yes, it's quite a distinctive accent.
I heard, mind yourself, she'd say.
Yeah, you tend to dose it when people in movies and so on use it because it's not that common.
But yes, yes indeed.
Very warm, friendly people.
My dad, because I'm from Liverpool, my dad used to work on the dock police in Liverpool.
And we, of course, had the B ⁇ I boats that used to come in.
And the ones that went to Belfast would go backwards and forwards.
So I got to know quite a few people from Northern Ireland there.
And I think there are lots of links between Liverpool and Northern Ireland.
Oh, there are, yes, yes, yes indeed.
But anyway, let's get to the topic in hand.
I mentioned on one of my shows recently the subject of Comet ISIN, I-S-O-N, because I've had a few people, including a friend of mine, email me very concerned about this thing.
So I want to talk about that.
Tell me first about Armar Planetarium.
I did a little bit of research about it.
It seems that it was opened in, what, 1968?
And at the time, it cost £120,000 if the figures were right to build.
You can't even get an apartment for that these days.
No, no, no, you couldn't.
Armar Planetarium is the oldest planetarium that's still functioning in the British Isles.
And we're very, very proud of it.
It's one of the world's leading planetarias.
It's always been a place where we've innovated the technology of planetaria.
We have a marvelous dome.
It's the oldest part of the building.
It was built back in 1968.
Its construction was supervised by a name you'll be familiar with, Patrick Moore.
Patrick, the great astronomer in this country, who died, of course, just over a year ago, didn't he?
Yes, yes, he did indeed.
He was the first director of the planetarium, although he looked after its construction and he actually stepped aside when it opened to the public.
But as I say, the dome's at the oldest part, it seats 94 people and we can take you on amazing tours through the universe with the technology there and with all sorts of other educational and fun activities on.
It's a marvelous place to work if you enjoy talking about the stars.
And I feel very privileged to have the chance to work there.
Wonderful job.
I think you've got one of my dream jobs there.
How much of the work of a planetarium like yours is exploring space and how much of it is educating people about it?
Okay, well, we are an educational facility as opposed to a research facility.
We actually have neighbours just up the hill from us is Armagh Observatory, which was founded back in 1791.
It's one of the oldest observatories in the British Isles.
And they're where research goes on.
But we are here to spread the news about what's up in the sky through visitors who come here and see our various shows and other activities.
Also, the blog is an important aspect of it.
Talking to people like yourself, we take questions by phone or by email from the public.
And you're saying about UFO information on our blog.
That's from my own personal experience.
It is one of the things, it is a topic, it's one of the we get asked about most.
There is a very large public interest out there, and I feel that we should be serving that interest.
Now, I try and approach it from the astronomer's point of view, and I try and help.
If people get on the phone to me saying something odd in the sky last night, if I can try and find a reasonable astronomical explanation of what they saw, I will offer it to them.
I can't say that's exactly what they saw because I wasn't with them, but it seems plausible to me that's what they could have seen.
All right, I want to get into that a little later because I want to tackle this comet that's supposedly, well, not supposedly, it's definitely heading towards this planet and past it, or even towards this planet and at it if you listen to some of the people who are talking about this.
But the reason that you got in touch with me originally was that I mentioned the concerns of a few people who've been emailing me, including a friend of mine, who sends me a lot of emails, a lot of images, and a lot of concerns about Comet ISON.
So first of all, what I'd like to ask you, Colin, is from what you've observed and what you know, what is Comet ISON?
It is a comet, which is obviously not.
And what a comet is, it's a block of material.
When I say it's a block, it's maybe about the size of a city.
It's a few kilometers or a few miles across.
It's a mixture of ice and rock.
And as far as we know, there are billions, possibly trillions of these things floating away in the distant reaches of the solar system, far, far beyond Pluto.
Every so often, one of these things gets a little sort of gravitational nudge and starts heading into the solar system where the planets are.
As it gets closer to the sun, the sun's light makes some of the ice it's made off essentially evaporate, and this can form a spectacular tale.
And we can see this in our skies from night to night moving across.
And this particular one, when it was first discovered, it looked as though it could be one of the most spectacular ones we've ever seen.
That's what people were saying, wasn't it?
Now, we have to say that this was only discovered fairly recently, wasn't it?
It's only just over, isn't it just over a year or so ago?
Yeah, it's September last year.
I should say, by the way, the name, it's a bit unusual.
It's actually named after the set of telescopes that was used to discover it.
It's a thing called the International Scientific Optical Network, which is about 30 or so telescopes spread across the world, specifically designed or intended to look into space and find things like comets.
Now, one of the conspiracy theorists about this, let's deal with it while we're talking about Eisen's name, said that there are many unusual aspects about this comet.
And the first one, right from the ground up, is that its name is not standard.
It's not usual.
You've just said that yourself.
Normally it's named perhaps after the person who discovered it.
But this one is named after that institution.
Why is that?
The two gentlemen who discovered were a couple of Russian astronomers, Novishki and Novicho Nok.
I hope I've said that right.
Apologies if they're listening and have I've said it wrong.
Comets often get named, and I'm saying named in speech marks.
Their sort of popular name comes from their discoverer.
And the classic example of that, lots of your listeners will remember, was Comet Hale-Bopp in the 90s, which is named after two gentlemen, Mr. Hale and Mr. Bopp, who saw it more or less simultaneously.
So they got joint priority over it.
Proper serious astronomers would actually use a sort of code number for a comet and for what everybody's calling comet IZON.
That's C2012 S1 and that gives you the year it was discovered, the month that was discovered, when it was discovered in the month and an idea of what kind of comet it is.
So that means something to astronomers.
I think to be honest, it's been called Izon because that's easy for newspapers and the other media to say.
I think that's probably the main reason for it.
And why are these things often discovered so late?
How come we haven't been able to see them years out?
Okay, because they are actually very small.
It is only a few kilometers across.
And I've been saying how they're made of ice, ice and rock.
Those are the main components of them.
But there's lots of other chemical compounds there.
And this was a thing that was only sort of realized in the 80s, most particularly whenever Halley's Comet was back then.
And the European sent a probe there.
Comets are actually, their nuclei of a comet are actually very black.
They're almost as black as tar.
And this is staining just other chemical compounds are in them.
So we're trying to look into space and see a very tiny, very, very black object.
In some ways, it's amazing they can see them this far.
In olden times, we wouldn't usually discover a comet until its tail started to form because the tails, some of you can't miss.
So in some ways, I'd say it's amazing we can actually see them when they're so far.
And it shows how much a telescope and other technologies advanced over the years.
Is there anything unusual about Comet ISON to justify this frenzy there's been amongst some people about it?
Okay, well I think the thing was it's a new comet.
And I say that it's been in existence for billions of years, but it's coming towards the sun for the first time.
There are other comets, again lots of the ones people are familiar with, such as Halley, that'd be a classic example, have been come close to the sun many, many times.
And every time they come close to the sun, I've said about how gas and other materials escape from them, that means the comet's getting smaller.
And as time goes on, it'll be less and less spectacular.
And that was one of the things in the 80s when Halley came back.
It wasn't as spectacular as it had been on its last visits back in 1910.
So this one eyes on is making its first trip into the inner solar system and it appeared quite big.
And it's also going to come very close to the sun.
That's another crucial thing.
And the closer it comes to the sun, the more sun's energy will be on it, which means more stuff will escape from it, which means they'll have a bigger tail.
And we see the tail because of reflected sunlight.
So there seems to be everything standing there to make one of those spectacular comets in decades.
Now, a sad thing has happened is it hasn't been living up to the initial expectations.
Based on early predictions, it should be much brighter now than it actually is.
And it seems to be just something, just variation in its composition.
We're still holding out some hopes.
I mean, it's going to come within 1 million kilometers of the sun.
It will get really hot then, and it could form a very spectacular tail, maybe even still visible in daytime, which is some of the early expectations.
Maybe just, we'll see that.
But as I say, Howard, it hasn't proved as dramatic as we're expecting.
Back at the start of this year, I put a blog post saying how by this time we ought to be able to see it with binoculars.
And it's still even a big telescope.
So the only way of capturing it is with a long exposure photograph.
One of the things that's being said By a lot of these people who are talking about Comet ISON and are alarmed about it, is that images of the comet are not exactly few and far between, but there are not as many of them out there as you might expect.
That they're not being made available in the kind of numbers that you would expect, so that people who would like to observe it and people who'd like to know more about it, they can't really make an informed decision as to what this thing is and what it's going to do.
Well, it is more down to, it is very difficult to take.
As I was saying, I was looking.
If you do a Google search for pictures, you'll find some lovely images that surprisingly mainly amateurs have taken off it.
Why is that?
I've heard that before, that a lot of amateurs have taken these pictures, but we're expecting them from the big space agencies, ESA, NASA.
This might surprise you.
In my experience, amateurs have more time to do this.
Also, I would say what amateurs, I don't mean this at all sparring.
In fact, it's wonderful, but they're very, very keen sometimes on getting very pretty photographs and will go to a lot of effort to get a really nice photograph.
Whereas scientists are perhaps more interested in getting, I don't know, spectroscopic readings or something like that of the comet and aren't so interested in imaging it.
Now, when it does get closer in to the sun, there will be a lot more attempts to take pictures with the big telescopes.
Hubble did, the Hubble Space Telescope did take a lovely set of pictures earlier this year.
And again, I'm sure your listeners know the comet passed very close to Mars in the past fortnight.
And we have several spacecraft either on or around Mars.
And they intend to take pictures of them.
One thing slowing down this little bit is the American government shutdown.
We haven't seen results from some of the American probes because the people who should be working on them are being forced to stay at home because of this strange government closure.
And of course, there are even people out there saying that that is a part of the big conspiracy.
It's one of the reasons that the government is shut down because they don't want us to know what this thing is going to do.
Well, they think there'd probably be an easier way of doing it than that.
The European Space Agency has a probe going around Mars at the moment called Mars Express, and they did attempt to take pictures of the comet.
And the last I've heard is they didn't get anything.
And I can sort of understand that because the cameras on the probe are designed to look down the surface of Mars, which is, from the probe's point of view, is only a few hundred miles away and is big and bright.
They're not designed to point it into the opposite way, into the depths of space, to look at something small and faint.
So I'm not that surprised.
Basically, I would sort of just keep watching and you'll see as the months go, well, the weeks go on now, more interesting photos coming.
And I would certainly look at sites like Universe Today and so on.
They've been putting up images sent into them by amateurs and there are some very nice ones.
And these are amateurs who went to a lot of trouble.
They're sometimes exposures of 20 minutes or more to get a nice picture of it.
So it's not yet something you can just go out and see.
Even putting your eye to the eyepiece of telescope, you're not going to see yet.
Okay.
Email from my friend Gary.
Gary's a guy I was at school with in Liverpool years ago.
And I lost touch with him for decades.
And I got an email through my website, oh, just a period of weeks ago, expressing concern about Comet ISON.
Latest email from him over the weekend says, images I viewed Mars myself yesterday morning around 4.30 a.m.
And it appeared fuzzy through my high-powered binoculars, seemingly backing up claims that Mars has indeed been hit by a plasma energy discharge.
Is that true and what would that mean?
I have to say I disagree a wee bit with that because I was looking at Mars on Saturday morning and I didn't notice anything that I haven't seen before.
I have heard this talk about plasma discharges and so on.
As far as I understand, there's one particular gentleman's pushing this theory from his own website and YouTube videos and so on.
All right, so you think this is just speculation, yeah?
Yes, to be kind.
But could the passing of a comet like this engender, it can, can't it, a discharge of great energy?
That can happen, can't it?
Well, the biggest danger, and I say danger in, again, in speech marks, that common presence would be were to hit some planet directly.
And we do know things like this have happened in the past.
The famous Tunguska explosion in June 1908, where a large area of Siberian forest was demolished by something that fell from the sky.
The best thinking about that was that was a small chunk of comet material did that.
The only other thing I can sort of point your listeners at, and I do know from questions I've received, there's also a lot of concern about the comet when it makes its close approach to the sun.
Will it trigger an unpleasant solar event?
Well, that is the biggest concern that I've been hearing about.
And, you know, can you ease our minds on that score?
I have no concern about it at all.
I mean, the comet is not, it's got, That's very, very close.
But it's not actually going to touch the surface of the Sun or anything like that.
And there is no historical record ever of a comet causing any kind of activity in the Sun.
Now, there are some people who are saying that, but they tend not to be coming from a comet science point of view or from a solar physics point of view.
To be honest, if comets moving close to the Sun could trigger solar events, astronomers would be using this to predict solar events.
And I should say, by the way, there are a lot of comets out there.
At any one time, there are 100 or so comets closer to the Sun than the planet Jupiter is.
They tend to be very old and faint and dead ones, and they're not actually doing any activity at the moment.
But it seems strange to me why people are singling out just one comet to potentially cause a disaster when there's a lot more Out there.
Sorry, I was just going to say about this issue.
There is one astronomer, as far as I know, who has written a paper.
His name is John Brown, and he's the astronomer royal for Scotland.
He did some research a couple of years ago about comets moving very, very close to the sun, mainly from the point of view of what will make a comet break up as it approaches the sun.
And he's all sort of interesting stuff about how the solar heating will cause stresses and strains in them.
But as they get closer still to the sun, there'll be drag from the sun's atmosphere, which does a little whisp of atmosphere, which can turn them into pieces.
But he did in his paper say about a worst possible case, which we have never observed.
And we're not going, certainly this comet is not going to do this because we can predict its orbit with 100% accuracy.
But there's a worst possible case where a comet were going to fall into the sun.
And that could potentially trigger solar activity.
Wouldn't necessarily be dangerous to us here on Earth, but that's the only sort of situation we could actually imagine this happening in.
There's papers online.
Listeners can check that out themselves.
But any disturbance on the sun can have an effect upon us, can't it?
I mean, electrical power grids, EMF discharges from the sun can affect a lot of things that we do down here that affect the way that we live our modern lives.
So can you be absolutely 100% certain that nothing bad is going to happen as this thing goes by, near or into the sun?
I can say I'm very sure a comet ITON is not going to trigger any kind of disaster on Earth.
When there's a major solar event, it can fire a shower of material towards the Earth.
It can interact with the Earth's upper atmosphere, and this can cause a beautiful aurora display, which are one of the most fantastic sights in nature.
It's caused by these particles from sun hitting the Earth's atmosphere and causing the gas atmosphere to glow.
It's a lovely thing to see.
But it also induces electrical currents.
There are two electoral cases in, I think it was 1989, the power grid in Quebec was knocked down by a solar event.
That was absolutely huge.
That affected millions of people.
Yes, absolutely.
One of the things, again, to be reassuring, when it happened, it was a sort of thing nobody thought ever could happen.
But now utilities companies, electrical utility companies are aware that this is a possibility.
To the best of my knowledge, they're far more prepared for something like that.
And I think that would be, I mean, there have been larger solar events since 1989, but none have caused anything like that.
And I mean, again, it just was in one particular region in Quebec, one particular set of utilities.
There are lots of other regions all around the world that could potentially have been affected, and they didn't see the same thing.
So in some ways, the folks in Quebec were a wee bit unlucky.
But what was going on is the largest solar event we know of, and obviously these things have been going on as long as there's been a planet Earth, but for most of that time there's been no humans there to observe them or even for thousands of years, even when there was people around, we weren't aware of these things happening.
But the first one we're really aware of was in 1859.
It's called the Carrington event, after an astronomer called Carrington, who first was aware of something was going on in the sun.
And again, there was a massive solar storm.
There were aurorae seen as far south as the Caribbean, which is very, very unusual.
And what happened there was electric currents were induced in telegraph wires.
And there are a couple of documented cases of small fires being caused by basically telegraph burning itself out.
But it was an amazing event.
Some accounts do exaggerate it.
And they talk about the fires as though it was major conflagrations rather than inconveniences.
So anyway, if something happened again, yes, it could cause trouble, but people are far more prepared for this sort of thing than they were even 30 years ago.
So those kind of events do happen, have happened, but they won't be triggered by Comet ISON.
I am very, very, very, very, very certain to about 99.99999 decimal points.
That's always going to happen.
Colin, just one other thing, though, before we leave ISON, and thank you for doing this special update edition of The Unexplained, not a regular edition, just a shortened edition to give you the latest facts about ISON.
Some people have been concerned that the colour of this thing has changed.
It's gone green.
Yes, that's true.
In fact, in some of the photos amateurs have taken of it, it's a really nice shade of green.
This isn't that unusual.
In fact, it's quite common amongst comets.
What happens is, I've said before, as it gets closer to the sun, it warms up and frozen material starts to leak off into space.
Some particular chemical compounds, when they're exposed to radiation, they give out particular colours.
And two materials we find in comets are a strange thing we don't get on Earth.
It's two carbon atoms joined together.
And the other thing we get in comets' tails is, this sounds scary, cyanogen, which is actually a poison.
They both have this characteristic of glowing green.
So this is a marker that those particular chemical compounds are in the tail of the comet.
Now, this does worry people sometimes.
The classic story about this is in 1910, when Halley's Comet came back, they discovered cyanogen in its tail.
And in 1910, the Earth was actually going to pass through Comet Halley's tail.
And people were worried.
And there's reports of people sealing themselves into airtight rooms and things like that.
But what you have to remember is the tail is incredibly tenuous.
If you could take the whole tail of a comet, which can be a million miles long, but you could take a whole million miles, squeeze all the gas in it together, it would probably fit into a good-sized symbol.
It's incredibly thin.
It certainly isn't going to poison the atmosphere.
It would pass directly through it.
And just also, we're not going to pass directly through this comet's tail.
We're going to pass through its orbital track in January next year, but the tail, the gas tail itself, will not be in that particular region of space at the same time.
So there's nothing to worry about.
And the green isn't a sign of anything unusual.
It happens for lots of comets.
And I've seen it before myself with others.
Now, if the world wants to know more about Comet ISON or about any astronomical matters, you've got a very good website.
What is the address of that website, Colin?
Okay, our main homepage is www.armatplanet.com.
And our blog is www.armatplanet.com slash blog.
And you can also follow us on Twitter.
And we update that regularly throughout the day.
That's great.
Colin, listen, thank you very much for giving us this special update about the status of Comet ISON and hopefully some of the fears that people have.
I'm sure not all of them will have just been eased by the words that you've said.
But Colin Johnston, thank you very much.
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