Travelers In The Night

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

Some of the 635,000 impact craters found on Mars are the result of such violent impacts that pieces of Mars are ejected, travel around the solar system, and a few become one of the several hundred Martian meteorites which have been discovered here on Earth. An experiment is described which does not prove we are descendants of martian bacteria however it does improve our ability to protect our planet and understand where life may be possible elsewhere in the universe.

389E-426-Rose Rules Again Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rose Matheny discovered 8 new Earth approaching object candidates on a single night with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona. One of them, 2017 YO is a mile and a half diameter, main belt asteroid, while the other 7 are interesting Earth approaching objects. Another one of Rose's single night discoveries is 2017 YM1. When Rose first spotted it this space rock was moving rapidly north, at 6.9 miles per second, away from the Earth in the constellation of Ursae Major. About 5 days earlier it had passed near both the Earth and Our Moon at which time it was too far south to be seen from Arizona. This space rock is about 92 feet in diameter, orbits the Sun once every 2.25 years, and can come to less than a tenth of the Moon's distance from us. 2017 YM1 is about 1.5 times larger than the Chelyabinsk (Shell ya binsk) meteor which in 2013 broke many thousands of windows and injured 1,200 people. According to Perdue University's impact calculator, a space rock like 2017 YM1 enters the Earth's atmosphere once every hundred years or so with an energy of 250 kilotons of TNT, explodes into a cloud of fragments at about 73,000 feet, rains pieces onto the ground, and produces a sonic boom that would get your attention as it breaks a lot of windows. Asteroid hunter's goal is to discover any such impactor days before it enters the Earth's atmosphere so that people can be warned to stay away from doors and windows. For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.

© 2026 A. D. Grauer

Asteroids could provide a solution for the serious problem of how to protect astronauts from harmful solar and cosmic radiation during long duration space flights and thus eliminate the need for the spacecraft itself to have heavy shielding material. The idea is for the spacecraft to spend most of the journey inside the asteroid.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was searching for Earth approaching objects with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he discovered an interesting new comet moving through the constellation of Leo. After Greg posted his discovery observations on the Minor Planet Center's Near Earth Confirmation Page it was observed over the next 3 weeks by 10 different observatories around the world. These data were used to calculate the details of the new object's 51 year path around the Sun and give it the name Comet C/2017 W2 (Leonard) . Greg's newly discovered comet's orbital plane is almost at a right angle to paths of the planets and most of the asteroids so that it spends most of it's time in the lonely space high above or far below the rest of the members of our solar system. Riding with Comet C/2017 W2 (Leonard) would bring a space traveler into the inner solar system about once per human lifetime. Greg's comet receives only mild solar heating since at it's closest it is about 3 times further from the Sun than we are making it unlikely to ever be bright for human observers. At it's furthest from the Sun, Comet Leonard is in a very cold region, receives less than 1% solar energy than we do, and and likely to have a surface temperature of about -300 degrees Fahrenheit. Greg's comet is likely to remain as it is for eons since it spends so much of it's time far from the Sun and the gravitational tugs of most of the rest of the members of our solar system.
© 2026. A. D. Grauer