Lonely wanderer

The phrase "the vastness of interstellar space" gets thrown around a lot, but it's hard for a lot of us even to wrap our brains around how vast it is.

Here's an analogy that will give you a feeling for it.  Imagine that the Sun (which is about 1.4 million kilometers in diameter) is shrunk down to the size of a marble, with a diameter of about 1.5 centimeters.

The Earth would be about the size of a grain of fine sand, and would be roughly a meter and a half away.  Jupiter would be eleven times larger in diameter, and over five times farther away.

You ready?  The closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, would be a somewhat smaller marble, over four hundred kilometers away.  So if the marble-Sun was located in my living room, here in upstate New York, the marble-Proxima-Centauri would be somewhere around Baltimore, Maryland.

Everything in between is empty space.

I remember when I first watched the brilliant short video Powers of Ten (which, if you haven't seen it, take ten minutes and watch -- you won't be sorry) when I was perhaps seventeen years old, and I recall vividly being blown away by the magnitude of it all -- and how once you're even in the outer reaches of our own Solar System, the Sun has diminished in brightness until it looks like nothing more impressive than an unusually bright point of light.  You get very much farther out, and the Sun itself is seen to be a rather dim and ordinary star, swallowed up in the diamonds-on-black-velvet of the perpetually dark interstellar sky.

This whole mind-boggling topic comes up because of an analysis of a comet that zipped through the Solar System late last year.  Comet 2I/Borisov, which never got closer than the orbit of Mars nor bright enough to see without a telescope, didn't make much of an impact on the layperson -- if they heard about it at all, it was on the level of "hey, there's a comet out there," but the less-than-spectacular show it put on from Earth meant that most people probably never even heard about it.

But 2I/Borisov was hiding something pretty spectacular, something that was the subject of two papers in the journal Nature Astronomy this week.  The comet had a chemistry so peculiar that it seems as if it was formed in another star system -- then made its way across interstellar space to make one and only one slingshot path around our Sun, never to be seen again.

Comet 2I/Borisov [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA and the European Space Agency]

The tipoff was that the comet had an unusually high amount of carbon monoxide -- three times higher than had ever been observed in a "local" comet.  Here's what the first paper, by Martin A Cordiner (astrochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) et al., had to say:

Comets spend most of their lives at large distances from any star, during which time their interior compositions remain relatively unaltered.  Cometary observations can therefore provide direct insight into the chemistry that occurred during their birth at the time of planet formation.  To date, there have been no confirmed observations of parent volatiles (gases released directly from the nucleus) of a comet from any planetary system other than our own...  2I/Borisov must have formed in a relatively CO-rich environment—probably beyond the CO ice-line in the very cold, outer regions of a distant protoplanetary accretion disk, as part of a population of small icy bodies analogous to our Solar System’s own proto-Kuiper belt.

For what it's worth, the CO ice-line -- the boundary between where carbon monoxide can exist as a solid and where it volatilizes into a gas -- occurs at a temperature of about 25 degrees above absolute zero.  So "very cold" doesn't begin to describe it.

The second paper, by Dennis Bodowitz (planetary scientist at Auburn University) et al., describes what was so unusual about it:

Interstellar comets offer direct samples of volatiles from distant protoplanetary disks.  2I/Borisov is the first notably active interstellar comet discovered in our Solar System.  Comets are condensed samples of the gas, ice and dust that were in a star’s protoplanetary disk during the formation of its planets, and inform our understanding on how chemical compositions and abundances vary with distance from the central star.  Their orbital migration distributes volatiles, organic material and prebiotic chemicals around their host system.  In our Solar System, hundreds of comets have been observed remotely, and a few have been studied up close by space missions.  However, knowledge of extrasolar comets has been limited to what could be gleaned from distant, unresolved observations of cometary regions around other stars, with only one detection of carbon monoxide.  Here we report that the coma of 2I/Borisov contains substantially more CO than H2O gas, with abundances of at least 173%, more than three times higher than previously measured for any comet in the inner (<2.5 au) Solar System.  Our ultraviolet Hubble Space Telescope observations of 2I/Borisov provide the first glimpse into the ice content and chemical composition of the protoplanetary disk of another star that is substantially different from our own.

Apparently, the trajectory of the comet tracks its origin back to a point somewhere in the constellation Cassiopeia -- but which star, and how far away it formed, is impossible to tell.

But it makes me picture that chunk of ice starting millions, possibly billions, of years ago in a disc of debris around a far-distant star, then being ejected and wandering for eons in the dark cold of interstellar space before having a single chance encounter with our Sun -- and afterwards, launching off in a different direction to wander in the voids once more, perhaps forever.

The whole thing makes me feel kind of sorry for it.

While anthropomorphizing a comet is probably ridiculous, it does bring home how huge the universe is, and how (comparatively) insignificant we are.  Which is always a good thing to keep in mind.  Humans tend toward hubris, and being reminded every so often that we're not actually All That And A Bag Of Potato Chips is worth it.

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Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The light show of a lifetime

Because I am absolutely saturated with the bad news about COVID-19 and our government's complete balls-up of a response -- as I suspect many of us are -- today I'm going to focus on something to look forward to.

During my lifetime, comets have largely not lived up to the hype.  Oh, they're cool, no doubt about it, but compared to accounts of the double-header of "daylight comets" that occurred in 1910 -- the unnamed "Great Comet" that appeared in January, and Halley's Comet in April -- the ones I've seen have been faint, visible to the unaided eye as a vague streak, showing their unearthly beauty only through binoculars or telescopes.  The first comet I remember anticipating, Kohoutek in 1973, fizzled miserably, and the claims that it would be the "Comet of the Century" fell far short of the mark.  Even Halley's reappearance in 1986 was a bit of an anticlimax, with a display that was nowhere near as spectacular as it had been in 1910.

But this time we may just have a winner.

Discovered this past December by the automated search program with the rather terrifying name "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System," Comet C/2019-Y4 (ATLAS) is already brightening rapidly, and has increased by four magnitudes in only three months.  (It's currently at a magnitude of +15, well below the threshold for unaided-eye visibility.)  If it continues on its current trajectory brightness-wise, by mid-May it could be at a magnitude of -8 -- four magnitudes brighter than Venus.

If that happens, it could actually be the best comet of the past hundred years.

Still, it's wise to remember the words of Canadian astronomer David Levy, co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy in 1993, which made a spectacular collision with the planet Jupiter the following year.  "Comets are like cats," Levy said.  "They have tails and they do whatever they want."

So we really don't know for sure what it's going to do.  Writing for the website Astronomy, Alister Ling says, "The big unknown: Is Y4 ATLAS a lightly powdered rubble pile that produces a meager tail that dissolves into nothingness?  Or does luck strike us with a dust-choked snowball whose tail forms the magnificent sword we see in paintings of old?  A touch of aurora or noctilucent clouds would really top off the light show."

One bit of good news for those of you who, like me, live in the Northern Hemisphere; if ATLAS puts on a grand performance, we've got front-row seats.  The path of the comet against the backdrop of stars makes a swoop through the northern sky, starting near the Big Dipper, peaking in brightness in May as it passes the through the constellation of Perseus, finally disappearing from sight in June near Betelgeuse in Orion.

[Image courtesy of Alison Klesman (via TheSkyX)]

Ling waxes rhapsodic over what we may be in for:

The week of May 25 to 31 is the week when we take the iconic pictures of Y4 and forge our memories of a lifetime. ATLAS is literally diving past the Sun, brightening a magnitude per day. The top half of the tail remains above the horizon all night, drawing our view downward. As minutes flow by, the tail brightens, overcoming the rising oranges and yellows of dawn until it reaches the brilliant head of the comet, lifting off the horizon...  If the sky is a dark transparent blue and ATLAS exceeds our expectations, we might snag the elusive trophy of a historical daylight comet.

I know better than to get my hopes up too high; comets' catlike behavior has caught me too often before.  But even if it's not the brightest object in the night sky, it should give us some fine opportunities for viewing, and even more for aficionados of astrophotography.

Whatever it does, it's nice to have something positive to look forward to.  So keep your eye on the skies, and hope for a light show that will be something to remember.

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Any guesses as to what was the deadliest natural disaster in United States history?

I'd speculate that if a poll was taken on the street, the odds-on favorites would be Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Camille, and the Great San Francisco Earthquake.  None of these are correct, though -- the answer is the 1900 Galveston hurricane, that killed an estimated nine thousand people and basically wiped the city of Galveston off the map.  (Galveston was on its way to becoming the busiest and fastest-growing city in Texas; the hurricane was instrumental in switching this hub to Houston, a move that was never undone.)

In the wonderful book Isaac's Storm, we read about Galveston Weather Bureau director Isaac Cline, who tried unsuccessfully to warn people about the approaching hurricane -- a failure which led to a massive overhaul of how weather information was distributed around the United States, and also spurred an effort toward more accurate forecasting.  But author Erik Larson doesn't make this simply about meteorology; it's a story about people, and brings into sharp focus how personalities can play a huge role in determining the outcome of natural events.

It's a gripping read, about a catastrophe that remarkably few people know about.  If you have any interest in weather, climate, or history, read Isaac's Storm -- you won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Wow failure

I love science, but I really wish it would stop crushing my hopes and dreams.

I say this because it has long been my dream to live long enough to see unequivocal proof of the existence of intelligent life on other planets.  I got my start, alien-obsession-wise, when I was about seven and became addicted to the abysmal 1960s television series Lost in Space.  The aliens were pretty low-budget, judging by the fact that most of them were...

... well, human.  Like the alien cowboy, the alien pirate (complete with a mechanical parrot), the alien motorcycle gang, the alien teenage hippies, the alien Wild West gunslinger, and Brunhilde.  I'm not making this last one up.  In this not-to-be-missed cinematic tour de force, Brunhilde appears out of nowhere, wearing a helmet with wings, yo-to-hoing like mad while seated on the back of an enormous plastic horse.  In that episode, we also meet Thor, who thinks he has lost his strength and has gone all weepy, and Will Robinson has to give him a heartwarming pep talk to convince him that true strength comes from within.

If you can watch that episode without pissing your pants laughing, you have a stronger constitution than I have.

Things took a step up (well, okay, that was pretty much the only direction available) with the original Star Trek series, where they at least got rubber noses and colorful makeup for the aliens, and induced some of them to speak in cheesy faux-Russian accents to make it clear which ones were the bad guys.  But then came Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Trek: First Contact and Cocoon and Starman and the best of 'em all, Contact -- which remains one of my top favorite movies ever -- and I was completely and permanently hooked on the idea that there might be extraterrestrial intelligence.

The problem is, the evidence for life on other planets, much less intelligent life, is kind of nonexistent.  There have been radio telescopes scanning the sky for decades, and so far there's been nothing to answer to Enrico Fermi's famous quip, "Where is everybody?"

There was one possibility, however.  It's called the "Wow Signal" -- a 72-second burst of radio waves captured in 1977 by Ohio State University's "Big Ear" Radio Telescope.  It was such an anomaly that astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote "Wow!" next to the computer printout that contained the signal, thus giving the phenomenon its name.

The spot in the sky where the burst originated -- near the star Chi Sagittarii in the constellation Sagittarius -- has been repeatedly scanned, but the signal has never been repeated.

So what was it?  The hopeful amongst us (which included me) thought it might be a radio transmission from intelligent life.  The more dubious figured there had to be some kind of more prosaic explanation -- but what that explanation might be, no one knew.  So I held on to the Wow Signal as being a real possibility for the realization of my dream.

Until today.

Antonio Paris, of the Center for Planetary Science at the Washington Academy of Sciences, shot down the extraterrestrial intelligence hypothesis this week with a neat, and completely plausible, explanation of the Wow Signal as the emission from the hydrogen-rich comet 266/P Christensen -- which was in that exact location when the signal was detected.

Paris writes:

In 2016, we proposed a hypothesis arguing that a comet and/or its hydrogen cloud was a strong candidate for the source of the “Wow!” Signal.  From 27 November 2016 to 24 February 2017, we conducted 200 observations in the radio spectrum to validate the hypothesis.  This investigation discovered that comets 266/P Christensen, P/2013 EW90 (Tenagra), P/2016 J1-A (PANSTARRS), and 237P/LINEAR emitted radio waves at 1420 MHz.  In addition, the data collected during this investigation demonstrated there is a well-defined distinction between radio signals emitted from known celestial sources and comets, including comet 266/P Christensen...  To dismiss the source of the radio signal as emission from comet 266/P Christensen, we repositioned the telescope away from the comet and conducted clear sky observations when the comet was not near the coordinates of the “Wow!” Signal.  During these clear sky observations, we detected no significant radio signal at 1420 MHz.  This investigation, therefore, has concluded that cometary spectra are observable at 1420 MHz and that the 1977 “Wow!” Signal was a natural phenomenon from a Solar System body.

To Dr. Paris, I have the following to say: "Nicely done!  Outstanding research!  I hate you!"  *grinds teeth*

So for us alien aficionados, it's one more dashed hope.  I mean, I'm supportive of science, and I appreciate the hard work and rigor, but really.  Leave me something to cling to, okay?  Because at the moment, all I'm left with is Brunhilde, and the yo-to-hoing is getting really annoying.

Crash course

As if we needed one, there's another clickbait sort-of-sciencey-or-something site that I should warn you about.

It's called the Mother Nature Network, and it bills itself as follows:

MNN is designed for people who want to make the world a better place.  Its content is engaging, non-political, and easy-to-understand and goes well beyond traditional "green" issues — encompassing topics that include family, health, home, travel, food, and community involvement. It has been labeled “The Green CNN” by Time, “The USA Today of Sustainability” by Fast Company, “Green Machine” by Associated Press, and “one of the hottest web properties out there” by NBC News; highlighted on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon; selected “Best Idea” at Fortune Magazine’s Green Summit; and chosen as a “Top Pick” by Newsweek.

Well, that may be, but it makes me wonder about how Time et al. are deciding who to laud.  MNN is even a cut below I Fucking Love Science as regards to sensationalized headlines, shallow analysis of actual science stories, and the usual smattering of "the world of the bizarre" kind of articles (as an example, on of their "trending stories" is "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016").

My objection, though, is not that there's another clickbaity website that exists solely to grab ad revenue -- heaven knows those are a dime a dozen, and include sites that claim to be legitimate media, such as The Daily Mail Fail.  My main beef with these places is the misrepresentation of science.  Because, heaven also knows that given the general low comprehension of actual science by the voting public, we do not need media making it worse.

As an example, check out their story from this past Wednesday called "A Whole Other Star Is On a Crash Course With Our Solar System" by Bryan Nelson.  Well, don't actually check it out unless you want them to get another click's worth of advertising money.  But let me tell you the gist, and save you the moral dilemma.

First, what the hell is with the headline?  Is Bryan Nelson in third grade?  "A Whole Other Star?"  So, it's not Part of Another Star?  Or the Whole Same Star As Before?

But we'll let that pass.  The topic does sound alarming, doesn't it?  But when you read the text, you find that we've got a while to prepare:

[I]n around 1.35 million years, that's close to what might happen.  Scientists have been plotting the course of a rogue star, Gliese 710, which currently sits in the constellation of Serpens some 64 light years from Earth.  Turns out, it's headed straight for us.

And "close to what might happen?"  What the fuck does that even mean?  Turns out Bryan Nelson isn't really sure either:

The star isn't scheduled to collide directly with Earth, but it will be passing through our solar system's Oort Cloud, a shell of countless comets and other bodies in the outer reaches of the Sun's gravitational influence.  You might think that's a safe distance, but the star is likely to slingshot comets all over the solar system, and one of those could very well have our name on it.

So a star is going to be in our general vicinity over a million years from now, and it might disturb some comets, which are likely to get flung in toward the inner Solar System, and one of them might hit the Earth.  Or not.

But that's not all:

Scientists calculated that Gliese 710 is the star that's expected to come closest to us within the next 10 million years (which is as far ahead as scientists could project), but it's not the only close encounter.  As many as 14 other stars could come within 3 light-years distance in the next few million years, and there are numerous fainter, red dwarf stars with unknown trajectories that could be headed our way too.

So we shouldn't just worry about Gliese 710, we should also worry about other stars which might or might not come close to the Solar System in the next few million years, not to mention other stars which might or might not exist and could do indescribably bad things if they do.

"Hoag's Object" -- the remnants of a collision between two galaxies [image courtesy of NASA]

I decided to do a little research, and find out where all this stuff had come from.  I found a paper in Astronomy Letters from 2010 (i.e., actual research and not hyped silliness) called "Searching for Stars Closely Encountering the Solar System" by Vladimir V. Bobylev, and it included the following:

Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalog and currently available radial velocity data, we have searched for stars that either have encountered or will encounter the solar neighborhood within less than 3 pc in the time interval from −2 Myr to +2 Myr. Nine new candidates within 30 pc of the Sun have been found. To construct the stellar orbits relative to the solar orbit, we have used the epicyclic approximation. We show that, given the errors in the observational data, the probability that the well-known star HIP 89 825 (GL 710) encountering with the Sun most closely falls into the Oort cloud is 0.86 in the time interval 1.45 ± 0.06 Myr. This star also has a nonzero probability, 1 × 10−4, of falling into the region d < 1000 AU, where its influence on Kuiper Belt objects becomes possible.

Did you catch that?  The "nonzero probability" of Gliese 710 influencing the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud comets is 1 × 10−4.

For you non-math-types, that's one in ten thousand.

If you needed any more indication that the Mother Nature Network article was sensationalized clickbait, there you have it.

So add that one to our list of suspect media sources, along with the usuals -- Natural News, InfoWars, Mercola, Breitbart, Before It's News, and so on.  My general advice is not to go there at all.  But if you disregard this, whatever you do, don't click on "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016."  You have been warned.

Orange dwarf catastrophe

It's no great insight that the media likes sensationalized stories, and that a lot of them (including, sadly, some major news outlets) have the attitude that facts don't matter much as long as they can keep readers reading.

What is more frustrating is the way the readers themselves become complicit in this dissemination of bullshit.  Now that we have the interwebz, sending along ridiculous "news" stories takes only a click. And before you know it, you have people believing that humanity is going to be wiped out because the Solar System is going to be destroyed during a collision with an orange dwarf star.

The original study, by astronomer Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, is interesting enough.  Astronomers have long known that the stars move relative to each other; this means that the constellations aren't fixed, and that millions of years from now, a time traveler from today wouldn't recognize any of the current star patterns.  (I still remember my first encounter with this idea, on Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when I was a freshman in college.  Seeing the animation of the movements of the stars in the Big Dipper was one of those moments when I realized, "I really want to know more about science!")

So it's not too surprising that some stars will get closer to the Sun over time.  And Bailer-Jones found that two orange dwarf stars are predicted to make relatively close approaches -- HIP 85605 could get as close as 0.13 light years, and GL 710 could make a pass of 0.32 light years.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Cool stuff.  But the media, unfortunately, is not content simply to report the facts.  Because that, somehow, would be boring.  This research has been picked up by a number of different online news sources, and one and all, they focus on the fact that this "close pass" might wipe us all out by gravitationally dislodging comets from the Oort Cloud, resulting in a "rain of comets," some of which could, perhaps, collide with the Earth.

Notice how many times I said "could" and "might" in the previous two paragraphs?  Bailer-Jones is up front about her study being speculative; the upper bounds for the pass distance of the two stars are 0.65 light years and 1.44 light years, respectively.  To put things in perspective; the closest estimate of HIP 85605 to the Sun was 0.13 light years, right?  Well, Pluto is 13 light hours from the Sun.  So this means that even at its closest, HIP 85605 will be 9,000 times further away than Pluto.

Next, let's consider the likelihood of a disruption of comets leading to a "rain of comets" and the certainty of a devastating Earth strike.  Let's assume that we do have a bunch of comets swooping inwards from the near pass of these stars.  What kind of target does Earth represent?

The issue here is scale, of course, and the amount of the Solar System that is (virtually) empty space. The best analogy I have run across is that if you shrank the entire Solar System down to a circle with a radius of 1,000 meters, with the orbit of Pluto as its perimeter, then the Earth would be about 7 meters from the center.

And it would be the size of a peppercorn.

So it's not exactly a huge target.  Yes, a comet or two could strike the Earth, as they have repeatedly during Earth's history.  No, it would not cause a rain of death.

But those aren't the only misrepresentations in the "news" story.  Not only has Bailer-Jones's research been sensationalized, it's had information added to it that is outright false.  In the above-linked story, which is no worse than the various other versions I've seen (i.e., I didn't pick this one because it was especially bad; they were all bad), here are some direct quotes, with commentary:

Apparently, the comets are made of rocks, dust and organic materials.

Actually, comets are mostly ice, a fact which has been known for decades and would have been immediately apparent had the author bothered to consult Wikipedia.

(T)he gravity [of the stars] can attract comets into the inner solar system and the passing comets might harshly affect Earth's atmosphere due to the powerful ultraviolet radiation that the comets might cause.

Ultraviolet radiation from what source, pray?  Comets aren't giant orbiting tanning lamps, for fuck's sake.

(A) small number of the alleged stars might explode like supernova while passing through the Oort Cloud.

Oh noes!  Not alleged stars explode like supernova!  That sound bad!

The Hip 85605 might reach the solar system in 0.13 to 0.65 light years away, while the GL 710 might take around 0.32 to 1.44 light years.

Ninth graders in Earth Science learn that a light year is a measure of distance, not time, a point that seems to have escaped the author, making me wonder how he ever got chosen to write a science story.  To be fair, unit confusion also plagued the writers of Star Wars, wherein we famously had Han Solo boasting that the Millennium Falcon had done the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs," which would be like saying that your car was so fast that you went to the grocery store in less than five miles.  (Of course, there are Star Wars apologists who have talked themselves into thinking that the scriptwriters had some kind of fancy time-travel space-warp relativity thing in mind when they wrote it.  Myself, I think they just didn't know what a parsec is.)

And of course, it's only midway through the article that we find out when this catastrophe is predicted to happen:

1.3 million years from now.

So, to boil it all down:

Two small stars might, or might not, pass 9,000 times further away from the Sun than Pluto is, some millions of years in the future.  This could increase the number of comets entering the inner Solar System, generating a somewhat higher likelihood of a comet striking Earth.

But that version of the story wouldn't have induced so many people to read it and pass it along, would it?  Nope.  So they add sensationalized nonsense to it, so as to make it better clickbait.

At least it's still better than the post I saw on social media yesterday, wherein someone asked for help for a school project their child is doing regarding why the stars were created.  The responses included that god had made them "to rule the night with the moon," "to be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years," and "to declare god's glory."  The scholarly references given were the Book of Genesis and Psalm 19.

But hey, if you're going to buy into non-science, I guess you should go all the way, right?

ISON is Wormwood! Or Nibiru! Or not!

My younger son, who shares my interest in investigating wacky beliefs, sent me a perplexing email a couple of days ago.

"Look up 'wormwood,'" is all it said.

I responded, "Wormwood like the plant?  Wormwood like the junior devil in C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters?"

He came back with, "Wormwood like the comet."

So I obligingly did a Google search for "wormwood comet," and found out something that would be funny if the people who believed it weren't so sincere: there is apparently a growing number of ultra-Christian types who believe that Comet ISON is the "falling star" mentioned in Revelation 8:10-11:

Then the third angel sounded: And a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water.  The name of the star is Wormwood.  A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died from the water, because it was made bitter.

ISON isn't a star, of course, but taking the bible literally doesn't apparently stop people from taking it metaphorically when it's convenient.

(Photograph courtesy of the European Southern Observatory and the Wikimedia Commons)

Take a look, for example, at this site, which mixes so many different kinds of crazy that it's hard to know where to begin -- biblical literalism, astrology, the magical significance of names, conspiracy theories, theosophy, and what appears to be completely original batshittery.  As an example of the latter, take a look at this paragraph:

Biblically, Joseph (Israel) is at the Altar (Initiated); Gentiles are on the Porch (Un-initiated). I cannot stress enough Stay on the Porch!! The Mark of this Beast is real! The Hopi aka Welsh Gypsies continuing the Solar Cult of ancient Egypt correctly forecasted the arrival of White Men, Railroads, Interstate Highways and Jet Travel complete with Chemtrails described as Spider Webs; their prediction at Prophecy Rock will in all likelihood, come true as well! 

Besides that entirely incomprehensible paragraph, the site contains pages and pages of stuff that all leads us to one conclusion: ISON is Wormwood, and in a week or so we're all gonna die in horrible agony as part of the long-ago-foretold plan of the God of Love and Mercy.

Now, you might say that this website is just the work of one crazy person, which could well be true -- but stuff like this is popping up all over the internet.  Some people disagree, though, which should be reassuring.  On the site Escape All These Things: End Times Prophecies Made Plain, we are told that we are told that ISON can't be Wormwood because Wormwood is the "third trumpet" and the first and second trumpets haven't sounded yet, because we probably would have noticed if a third of the world's plants had been burned up and a great mountain had fallen into the sea.

On the downside, though, is the possibility that ISON could be the Planet Nibiru, a mythical planet that is best known for conspicuously failing to show every other time it was supposed to.  In one of the best examples of pretzel logic I've ever seen, take a look at this page from the bizarre site Before It's News, wherein we find out that all of the other non-appearances of Nibiru were because the Illuminati wanted to play a game of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" to get us to let down our guard:

A few of those people could not live with the knowledge that millions of their fellow human beings were going to die in the future without even an opportunity to know what they were facing. There were a few who felt that the public had a right to know what was coming in order to make whatever preparations were possible. So from time to time there have been “leaks” of information. Little by little more and more information has been “leaked” until the whole grim picture has come together. In fact there were so many “leaks” of information about Planet X that some “brilliant insider” [Sic!] came up with the idea of planting disinformation designed to discredit the whole subject in the eyes of the public. So in 2001, 2002, and 2003 there was all kinds of information about Planet X being deliberately “leaked” to the public. Much of the information being released at that time claimed that the coming of Planet X would occur in May of 2003, and the public should prepare themselves for imminent destruction. On the one hand “official” sources were denying the whole story, while on the other hand equally “official” sources were steadily “leaking” disinformation to the public. Their SCAM worked like a charm. When Planet X DID NOT show up in May of 2003, most people labeled the whole subject of Planet X a hoax and began ridiculing anyone who would even bring up the subject.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone come right out and say, "You should believe us because we have a record of being 100% wrong in the past" before.

Anyhow, I just wish everyone would stop freaking out every time something interesting happens in the world of astronomy.  ISON has the potential to put on a great show during the first week of December, and I, for one, would love it if it did.  Weather permitting -- always a dicey thing in my cloudy, snowy part of the country -- I'll be out there looking for it on the morning of December 3 through 6.

Even if it means that I have to "get off the porch."

Comet ISON, and the end of the world as we know it

Ever since the media started calling Comet ISON the "Comet of the Century," I was waiting for the woo-woo hoopla to start.

There's something about comets that excites the imagination, to be sure, and I use the word "imagination" deliberately.  When the 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet was imminent, astronomer Camille Flammarion let slip that one of the materials present in comet tails was cyanide, and furthermore stated that the passage of the Earth through the comet's tail could "possibly snuff out all life on this planet."  This unleashed a panic wherein people purchased gas masks by the thousands, and more improbably, "anti-comet pills" and "comet umbrellas."  Because we all know that if you are exposed to cyanide, all you have to do is huddle underneath your umbrella and things will be just fine.

Of course, none of that came to pass, but that doesn't mean that people are any more sensible about things nowadays.  Halley reappeared in 1986, but not before we had another "Comet of the Century," Comet Kohoutek in 1973, which was supposed to be spectacular but which got downgraded to the Comet of Next Tuesday At 11 PM when it turned out to be nearly impossible to see.  This didn't stop noted wingnut David Berg, leader of the fringe group the Children of God, from claiming that Kohoutek was the harbinger of doom and a sign of the End Times, thus becoming one in a long series of instances where the world failed to cooperate and End, as planned.

Then, of course, we had the never-to-be-forgotten Comet Elenin, which in 2011 was rumored not to be a comet at all, but (1) a UFO, (2) a planet called Nibiru, (3) an incoming megaweapon that would destroy Earth, or perhaps (4) all of the above.  Elenin also sparked mass panic amongst people who failed 8th grade science when it was claimed that the comet was going to spark massive tsunamis, and cause the magnetic poles to flip.  Or possibly cause the whole Earth to flip over.  Or slingshot us right out of our orbit.  But fortunately for us, the Law of Gravitation is still strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, and Elenin's miniscule mass relative to the Earth's caused no effects whatsoever other than a disappointed "Awwww" from the woo-woos, especially when it disintegrated completely on close pass with the sun.

But all of that isn't stopping people from claiming that ISON is going to be the one.  Really, this time we mean it.  We already have one site claiming that ISON is an alien spacecraft, because when you digitally monkey around with the NASA photograph of the comet...

... you get this:

Well, q.e.d., as far as I can tell.

Then, there's the chance that ISON will cause a solar flare -- something not outside the realm of possibility, apparently, according to recent research by astronomer David Eichler of Ben Gurion University in Israel.  Eichler believes that even something as relatively small as a comet could cause a shock wave when it struck the sun because of how fast it's moving, and that shock wave would cause a solar flare/coronal mass ejection event that could wreak havoc with electronics here on Earth.  Not content with just having our cellphones get fried, the alarmists have already nicknamed ISON "the Sungrazer" and predicted that it will cause an "Extinction-Level Event."

Is it just me, or do these people seem to be happy about the obliteration of all life on Earth?

In any case, the actual research on ISON seems to indicate that (1) it's going to be another Kohoutek-style flop, visually, and (2) if it gets close to the sun, it will just disintegrate, like Elenin did.  Which means we'll have to wait for the next Comet of the Century to kill us all.

I'm sure there'll be one soon.  Me, I'm content to wait.