Travelers In The Night

The beautiful star cluster the Pleiades in the constellation of Tauris is about 100 million years old making it one of the youngest objects that you can see in the natural night sky. Data obtained by observing Oumuamua (“Oh-moo-ah-moo-ah”), the first object humans have identified which is definitely from outside of our solar system suggests that it is an icy body with a red, rock appearing shell, of carbon rich organic material. By tracing Omuamua's path for millions of years into the past, Dr. Fabo Feng of the University of Hertfordshire , found that it's slow speed in the vicinity of 5 stars in the Pleiades suggests that it was ejected from one of them. Check out the Pleiades with your unaided eye, binoculars or a small telescope and contemplate the messengers it might be sending our way.

A start up company Reflect Orbital is proposing to launch 50,000 satellite mirrors by 2035 to illuminate solar panels on Earth all night long. This would be devastating for human sleep cycles, birds, insects, plants  and many of the biological systems of organisms on which we all depend.

The mysterious Earth approaching object Phaethon (FAY-eh-thon) does not fit neatly into our definition of either an asteroid or a comet. Further it appears to be like the Peanuts character Pigpen in that it leaves a trail of dust and other fine debris in it's wake which in the case of Phaethon produces the Geminid Meteor Shower to delight us every year around Christmas time. Phaethon is amazing in that every 524 days it makes a death defying flight to a point less than one of half of the planet Mercury's distance from the Sun, where it's surface temperature reaches a mind boggling 1,200 Fahrenheit. During one of these events the NASA Stereo Spacecraft A discovered that Phaethon had rock dust tail.

However, according to a recent research project, the Rubin Observatory will discover but not give an adequate warning time for objects destined to hit the Earth. To provide time to take action to deflect an incoming object we will need to rely on ground based telescopes used by my Catalina Sky Survey teammates and other asteroid hunting groups as well as NASA’s NEO Surveyor satellite when it is launched.

Often observers report hearing a percussive sound, like a sonic boom from an aircraft, minutes after viewing a bright meteor fireball. In addition, in a fewer number of instances, there are many reliable reports of observers hearing popping, hissing, and rustling sounds at the same time they are observing a very bright meteor traveling though the night sky. Professional astronomers have long dismissed these reports saying that what these people hear simultaneously with their visual observations cannot be due to to sound traveling from the meteors path since sound travels 800,000 times slower than light and would take 1.5 to 4 minutes to traverse the distance that the light does in a tiny fraction of a second. Recent scientific studies have begun to shed light on the interesting mystery of how the small number of what we now call electrophonic meteors produce simultaneous light and sound. One theory is that the flickering bright light produced in the meteor's path is absorbed by by hair or other material near the observer's ears producing acoustic sound waves. An alternate hypothesis is that as the meteor streaks through our atmosphere it ionizes air molecules whose motion in the Earth's magnetic field generates radio waves which travel to objects near to the observer causing them to vibrate and thus produce sound. Either way observers with large amounts of hair or those near metallic objects like barbed wire fences are the most likely to hear these strange unusual sounds. If you are lucky you could hear a meteor's dying whispers and could even be the first person to record these sounds on your cell phone. For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.

© 2026. A. D. Grauer