APOD: Meteor Misses Galaxy (2019 Apr 30)

[APOD Robot]

Meteor Misses Galaxy

Explanation: The galaxy was never in danger. For one thing, the Triangulum galaxy (M33), pictured, is much bigger than the tiny grain of rock at the head of the meteor. For another, the galaxy is much farther away -- in this instance 3 million light years as opposed to only about 0.0003 light seconds. Even so, the meteor's path took it angularly below the galaxy. Also the wind high in Earth's atmosphere blew the meteor's glowing evaporative molecule train away from the galaxy, in angular projection. Still, the astrophotographer was quite lucky to capture both a meteor and a galaxy in a single exposure -- which was subsequently added to two other images of M33 to bring up the spiral galaxy's colors. At the end, the meteor was gone in a second, but the galaxy will last billions of years.

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[MarkBour]

I enjoyed the wonderful explanation text on today's APOD.

[Boomer12k]

Amazing image... I love the colors of M33... I am sooo glad it missed...

:---[===] *

[Iksarfighter]

Was the meteor going from left to right or from right to left ? Hehehe !

[JohnD]

To me, an extraordinary picture - glowing meteor trails?? Never heard, let alone seen. But more! I followed the link about those and found that it was not dust glowing in reflected sunlight, so only seen near sunrise/set, but an actual, light-releasing chemical process! Wow!
John

[orin stepanek]

A meteor is a funny thing! It vaporizes and is gone! Too bad ;so sad. but it could make a great wallpaper!

[Iksarfighter]

Meteor is going left to right if I compare with auroras, red is high and green is lower altitude.

Am I right ?

[aildoux]

Amazing shot. Better art than a lot of "artwork" I've ever seen.

[neufer]

---

[TheZuke!]

Neufer, I wouldn't say those Galaxies are "meatier".
B^)

[neufer]

Neufer, I wouldn't say those Galaxies are "meatier".

• Those Galaxy "Misses" are probably a little "Meatier" than you might have imagined:

<<The Miss Galaxy Pageant is an annual event held in Nukuʻalofa, Tongatapu in the Kingdom of Tonga that selects the "best" Fakaleiti. The Miss Galaxy Pageant celebrates the creativity, diversity and talent of GLBT Fakaleiti communities in Tonga. Contestants are mostly from Tonga, but may come from the Pacific and the Tongan diaspora. The Miss Galaxy contest both emulates and parodies the heterosexual gender stereotypes which are showcased in the Miss Heilala and considered normative in Tongan society. As with other examples of gender-liminal celebrations, the pageant performances are often humorous, sometimes lewd and/or provocative.>>

[rwlott]

Neufer, I wouldn't say those Galaxies are "meatier".

• Those Galaxy "Misses" are probably a little "Meatier" than you might have imagined:

<<The Miss Galaxy Pageant is an annual event held in Nukuʻalofa, Tongatapu in the Kingdom of Tonga that selects the "best" Fakaleiti. The Miss Galaxy Pageant celebrates the creativity, diversity and talent of GLBT Fakaleiti communities in Tonga. Contestants are mostly from Tonga, but may come from the Pacific and the Tongan diaspora. The Miss Galaxy contest both emulates and parodies the heterosexual gender stereotypes which are showcased in the Miss Heilala and considered normative in Tongan society. As with other examples of gender-liminal celebrations, the pageant performances are often humorous, sometimes lewd and/or provocative.>>

I don't know, Neufer. Your photo seems to depicts the Miss & Miss Teen Galaxy Scotland and Wales held annually in the UK, not the event in Tonga.

[neufer]

I don't know, Neufer.

Your photo seems to depicts the Miss & Miss Teen Galaxy Scotland and Wales held annually in the UK, not the event in Tonga.

I made you look though...didn't I

http://www.galaxypageantsuk.com/ts-cs/

[MarkBour]

I'm interested in a bit of a philosophical subtlety regarding the terminology given in the next-to-last link ("the meteor") by no less an authority than the American Meteor Society. They define meteor: "The light emitted from a meteoroid or an asteroid when it enters the atmosphere." I was surprised at this definition. Perhaps they just unintentionally worded it poorly. In my lifetime, I have always understood the word "meteor" to refer not to the flash of light, but to the falling piece of rock whose ablation was creating the brief flash or streak of light.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/meteor
meteor
NOUN
A small body of matter from outer space that enters the earth's atmosphere, becoming incandescent as a result of friction and appearing as a streak of light.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/meteor
Specific sense of "fireball in the sky, shooting star" is attested from 1590s. Atmospheric phenomena were formerly classified as aerial meteors (wind), aqueous meteors (rain, snow, hail), luminous meteors (aurora, rainbows), and igneous meteors (lightning, shooting stars). All the other senses have fallen away. When still in space beyond the atmosphere it is a meteoroid; when fallen to earth it is a meteorite. A periodically recurring fall of them (usually associated with a comet) is a meteor shower (by 1853).

(I added the bold markup to single out the sentence I am most interested in.)

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130209.html
... A current leading progenitor hypothesis is that a single large meteor once grazed the Earth's atmosphere and broke up. ...

Clearly the word "meteor" here is referring to the rock, not the flash.

Maybe I'm just splitting hairs here. Or is the American Meteor Society actually trying to change the meaning of the word?
They should take care, lest folks begin to refer to them as the American Meteor Illogical Society.

[Chris Peterson]

I'm interested in a bit of a philosophical subtlety regarding the terminology given in the next-to-last link ("the meteor") by no less an authority than the American Meteor Society. They define meteor: "The light emitted from a meteoroid or an asteroid when it enters the atmosphere." I was surprised at this definition. Perhaps they just unintentionally worded it poorly. In my lifetime, I have always understood the word "meteor" to refer not to the flash of light, but to the falling piece of rock whose ablation was creating the brief flash or streak of light.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/meteor
meteor
NOUN
A small body of matter from outer space that enters the earth's atmosphere, becoming incandescent as a result of friction and appearing as a streak of light.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/meteor
Specific sense of "fireball in the sky, shooting star" is attested from 1590s. Atmospheric phenomena were formerly classified as aerial meteors (wind), aqueous meteors (rain, snow, hail), luminous meteors (aurora, rainbows), and igneous meteors (lightning, shooting stars). All the other senses have fallen away. When still in space beyond the atmosphere it is a meteoroid; when fallen to earth it is a meteorite. A periodically recurring fall of them (usually associated with a comet) is a meteor shower (by 1853).

(I added the bold markup to single out the sentence I am most interested in.)

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130209.html
... A current leading progenitor hypothesis is that a single large meteor once grazed the Earth's atmosphere and broke up. ...

Clearly the word "meteor" here is referring to the rock, not the flash.

Maybe I'm just splitting hairs here. Or is the American Meteor Society actually trying to change the meaning of the word?
They should take care, lest folks begin to refer to them as the American Meteor Illogical Society. :-)

"Meteor" just refers to the visual phenomenon caused by the release of energy. The body itself is a meteoroid. Here are the complete IAU definitions:

Meteor is the light and associated phenomenon (heat, shock, ionization), which results from the entry of a solid object from space into a gaseous atmosphere.

Meteoroid is a solid object of a diameter between 30 µm and 1 meter moving in, or coming from, interplanetary space.

Meteorite is any solid object that survived the meteor phase in a gaseous atmosphere without being completely vaporized.

[BDanielMayfield]

Is there a meteorologist in the house to clear this up?

Oh, never mind, wrong field.

[Ann]

APOD Robot wrote:
At the end, the meteor was gone in a second, but the galaxy will last billions of years.

Click to view full size image

The future trajectories of M31, M33 and the Milky Way. Image:
© Orbits: E. Patel, G. Besla (University of Arizona), R. van der Marel (STScI).
Images: ESA (Milky Way), ESA/Gaia/DPAC (M31, M33)

Apparently, it will.

Look at the illustration at right. The red line shows the future trajectory of the Andromeda galaxy, the green line shows the future path of the Triangulum galaxy, and the blue line shows the future wanderings of our own galaxy. The circles show the three galaxies' current positions. The crosses show where the galaxies will be in 4.5 billion years.

As you can see, the Milky Way and Andromeda will experience a "glancing blow" in 4.5 billion years' time. But by then, M33 will have moved safely out of the way, far from the sound and fury of the big bullies of the Local Group.

Read more about the fate of the Milky Way, M31 and M33 here.

Ann

[Iksarfighter]

So nobody can confirm that this meteor is going from left to right.

Just a lot of bla bla bla...

[MarkBour]

So nobody can confirm that this meteor is going from left to right.

Just a lot of bla bla bla...

It's a great question. I was hoping our forum contributors who have meteor expertise would give an answer. Unless it is truly something nobody can discern from a meteor track, which I very much doubt.

I would offer a few possible ways to get the answer:

• Cheat. Maybe Aman Chokshi knows. You could ask him on Instagram. I'm not going to make an Instagram account just to try to ask.
• Get the image data, look this up in some tool like Stellarium, perhaps you can determine a likely direction, especially if there was a known meteor shower with a radiant. But even if it is not in such a group, you might be able to tell which way is the ground and get a likely answer. What I know of this image, it seems to have been taken on 2019-04-08 at 9:06 pm, which I suppose is local time, and it may have been taken from Ladakh, India. Again, my sources are not very reliable here. I tried that in Stellarium and the Triangulum was below the horizon. You could try to ask Aman for more data to get that right.
• If the trail is visible in full, often some asymmetry will tell you which end is the terminal end. Here, the trail looks pretty symmetric in our view, but if there are any indications of the final end of the streak, they would almost have to be off the image to the left. So that is very weak evidence that it actually traveled right to left in the image. And that's my best guess, right there.
• Two things that do not seem to help:
  • The shape of the wind-blown spreads is very interesting.

    

    Capture.JPG (17.16 KiB) Viewed 8824 times

    I thought perhaps there was a characteristic, that the "forward" edge might always be the one to have that rounded asymptotic shape, or that the "trailing" edge might be. But I doubt it. I think this is just a feature of where the wind is stronger, and that it would be able to go either way. I won't even try to define which edge I meant by "forward" versus "trailing", since it doesn't matter, as long as I don't think this helps decide.
  • I also once thought you could probably make some deductions based on the colors in the track, but I guess this is quite unreliable, the color of a part of each track apparently depends on multiple factors.

.
So, I tried to address your question, but I don't know the answer. Perhaps it all came out as "bla bla bla" to you once again.

[Chris Peterson]

So nobody can confirm that this meteor is going from left to right.

Just a lot of bla bla bla...

It's a great question. I was hoping our forum contributors who have meteor expertise would give an answer. Unless it is truly something nobody can discern from a meteor track, which I very much doubt.

It is, in fact, not something that can be reliably determined from the information contained in the image. It's unlikely the imager would be able to answer the question, unless he actually observed this, which I doubt. The color information is ambiguous, given the broadband filters and the fact that colors come both from meteoroid composition and atmospheric gases. The light curve isn't helpful, as meteors can brighten quickly and decay slowly, or brighten slowly and decay quickly. The shape of the train is potentially useful, but only if there is high altitude wind information available for very near the time of the image... also unlikely. An active meteor shower could be diagnostic, but for the last few months sporadics have been more numerous than any shower members.

So all in all, not much to go on.

[Nitpicker]

I don't think this image was recorded in early April. M33 was too close to the Sun at that time. Perhaps a month or more earlier.

[MarkBour]

I don't think this image was recorded in early April. M33 was too close to the Sun at that time. Perhaps a month or more earlier.

Thanks for confirming that. As I was using Stellarium online, I noticed the proximity on that date, but I wasn't sure if that would be a correct statement.

[MarkBour]

So nobody can confirm that this meteor is going from left to right.

Just a lot of bla bla bla...

It's a great question. I was hoping our forum contributors who have meteor expertise would give an answer. Unless it is truly something nobody can discern from a meteor track, which I very much doubt.

It is, in fact, not something that can be reliably determined from the information contained in the image. ...

Thanks, Chris.

[Iksarfighter]

So nobody can confirm that this meteor is going from left to right.

Just a lot of bla bla bla...

It's a great question. I was hoping our forum contributors who have meteor expertise would give an answer. Unless it is truly something nobody can discern from a meteor track, which I very much doubt.

It is, in fact, not something that can be reliably determined from the information contained in the image. It's unlikely the imager would be able to answer the question, unless he actually observed this, which I doubt. The color information is ambiguous, given the broadband filters and the fact that colors come both from meteoroid composition and atmospheric gases. The light curve isn't helpful, as meteors can brighten quickly and decay slowly, or brighten slowly and decay quickly. The shape of the train is potentially useful, but only if there is high altitude wind information available for very near the time of the image... also unlikely. An active meteor shower could be diagnostic, but for the last few months sporadics have been more numerous than any shower members.

So all in all, not much to go on.

Meteor is going left to right if I compare with auroras, red is high and green is lower altitude.

Am I right ?

[Chris Peterson]

It's a great question. I was hoping our forum contributors who have meteor expertise would give an answer. Unless it is truly something nobody can discern from a meteor track, which I very much doubt.

It is, in fact, not something that can be reliably determined from the information contained in the image. It's unlikely the imager would be able to answer the question, unless he actually observed this, which I doubt. The color information is ambiguous, given the broadband filters and the fact that colors come both from meteoroid composition and atmospheric gases. The light curve isn't helpful, as meteors can brighten quickly and decay slowly, or brighten slowly and decay quickly. The shape of the train is potentially useful, but only if there is high altitude wind information available for very near the time of the image... also unlikely. An active meteor shower could be diagnostic, but for the last few months sporadics have been more numerous than any shower members.

So all in all, not much to go on.

Meteor is going left to right if I compare with auroras, red is high and green is lower altitude.

Am I right ?

It's not certain. Too many things can influence meteor color, especially in an image. It's not a bad assumption, but it's far from definitive.