The sky was perfectly clear all night at Jim & Barbara Walker’s.  We spent a few minutes watching about 10:00 PM, but we didn’t see any Leonids.  When we went outside again from 4:00 AM to a little after 5:00, we saw a great many meteors, perhaps about 20 per minute at the peak around 4:30.  Their visible paths were mostly short because the meteors were partly washed out by the full moon.  The Leonids are the fastest meteors known, speeding into our atmosphere at 44 miles per second, so most of the individual Leonids were visible only for seconds.
       In our area, Bernie Zelazny observed roughly comparable rates in Sunny Glen, and so did Shannon Rudine at McDonald Observatory.  However, Shannon also saw several bright fireballs (-2 to -4 mag) with trains lasting for several minutes.
       Our son, Bob, saw a display comparable to ours under clear skies in central Missouri.  Laurent Pellerin, of the Central Florida Astronomical Society, reported many Leonids observed by the 150-200 people at a star party near Geneva, Florida; experienced meteor observers estimated a 10 minute peak of 1600-1800 per hour.  In south Georgia, Brad Bergstrom reported an average of 1meteor every 5 sec between 5:30 and 6 AM EST, and occasionally 2 or 3 meteors simultaneously.
       All in all, a great many people across much of the country saw a pretty fair show in terms of the number of Leonids, if not their brightness.  The full moon, of course, washed out many of the meteors we would otherwise have seen, and shortened the visible paths of others.

       (Edited from The Los Angeles Times and NASA, November 21, 2002.)  Previously secret satellite data now indicate that potentially catastrophic asteroids strike the Earth only about once every 1,000 years, far less frequently than previously thought.
       Using eight years of data collected for national security purposes by the departments of Defense and Energy, researchers disputed earlier estimates that asteroids about 50 meters (55 yards) in diameter enter the atmosphere once every 200 to 300 years.  Data from the new study suggest that a city is likely to be destroyed no more than every 30,000 years because most of the Earth is ocean and much of the land mass is sparsely populated, said David Morrison, a space scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center.

       (Bernie Zelazny brings this article to our attention.  Edited from NASA and American Scientist,  Nov 18,  2002.)  A nearby black hole, hurtling through the plane of our galaxy like a cannonball, has given the best evidence evidence yet that stellar-mass black holes are made in supernova explosions.  The black hole is speeding  along at 250,000 miles per hour, four times the average velocity of the stars in that neighborhood, propelled by the explosive kick of a supernova, one of the universe's most titanic events.
       Although black holes swallow light, the runaway black hole has a companion star, allowing astronomers to track it in Hubble Space Telescope images taken in 1995 and 2001.  Combining the Hubble data with  measurements of its radial motion toward Earth taken from ground-based telescopes yields the true "space velocity" of the black hole, and shows that it is streaking across the plane of our Milky Way in a highly elliptical orbit.  "This is the first black hole found to be moving fast through the plane of our galaxy," says Felix Mirabel of the French Atomic Energy Commission and the Institute for Astronomy and Space Physics of Argentina.  "This discovery is exciting because it shows the link of a black hole to a supernova," aside from observing gamma-ray busts from hypernovae (even more powerful stellar explosions), which are believed to make black holes.
       Though the black hole is roughly heading in our direction, it is at a "safe" distance, 6,000 to 9,000 light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Scorpius.  Mirabel believes the black hole may have been born in the inner disk of our galaxy, where the highest rate of star formation is taking place.  An aging, evolved star whirls around the black hole, completing one orbit just every 2.6 days.  The hole is slowly devouring the companion, which apparently survived the supernova that created the black hole.  This process makes blowtorch-like jets that stream away from the black hole at a significant fraction of the speed of light.  It is the second "microquasar" discovered in our galaxy, a small model of the monster black holes at the cores of extremely active galaxies, called quasars.

       (NASA, Washington; and The Miami Herald, October 30, 2002)  More than 33 years after the United States landed men on the moon, NASA is spending more than $15,000 to convince people that it really did happen and that the space agency didn't make it all up.
       Stubborn conspiracy theorists claim that NASA's six Apollo-program moon landings were faked.  After decades of belittling and ignoring them, NASA has decided to fight back.  It hired James Oberg, a Houston-based former aerospace engineer and award-winning author of 10 books on space, to confront skeptics point by point.  Many scientists already have done that on the Internet, but skeptics remain unconvinced.
       "Ignoring it only fans the flames of people who are naturally suspicious," Oberg said Tuesday in an interview.  Last year, Fox television twice broadcast a show entitled Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the Moon?, and NBC's Today show staged a debate on the topic.  Last month, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, punched a conspiracy theorist who had been pestering him to swear on a stack of Bibles that the landing was real.
       After the Fox show first aired, NASA put out a one-paragraph press release titled Apollo: Yes, We Did. Yet a 1999 poll found that 11 percent of the American public doubted the moon landing happened, and Fox officials said such skepticism increased to about 20 percent after their show, which was seen by about 15 million viewers.
       Stephen Garber, NASA's acting chief historian, said Oberg's 10-chapter, 30,000-word monograph "is not going to convince the people who believe in these myths.  Hopefully, it'll speak to other people who are broad-minded."  As an editorial question, perhaps we should ask how many of the people who don’t believe we went to the moon DO believe we’ve been visited by space aliens, as in the Roswell capers.

       (Edited from NASA, Oct 7, 2002)  Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have measured a distant world more than half the size of Pluto.  It's the biggest object found in our solar system since the discovery of Pluto itself 72 years ago.
       Astronomers have dubbed the new object "Quaoar" (pronounced kwa-o-wahr) after a Native American god.  It lies about 4 billion miles from the earth and moves around the Sun every 288 years in a nearly perfect circle.  NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has measured Quaoar and found it to be about 800 miles in diameter. That's about 240 miles wider than the biggest main-belt asteroid (Ceres) and more than half the diameter of Pluto itself.
       Quaoar is greater in volume than all known asteroids combined.  Researchers suspect that it’s made mostly of low-density ices mixed with rock, not unlike the makeup of a comet.  If so, Quaoar's mass is probably only one-third that of the asteroid belt.
       Michael Brown and Chadwick Trujillo of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, have reported these findings today at the 34th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Birmingham, AL.  Earlier this year, Trujillo and Brown used the Palomar 48-inch telescope to discover Quaoar as an 18.5-magnitude object creeping across the summer constellation Ophiuchus.  Although Quaoar was relatively bright (by the feeble standards of such distant objects) its disk was too small for the Palomar telescope to resolve.  Brown followed-up their discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope.
       Like the planet Pluto, Quaoar dwells in the Kuiper Belt, an icy debris field of comet-like bodies extending 3 billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit.  Over the past decade more than 500 icy bodies – Kuiper-Belt Objects or "KBOs" for short – have been found there.  With a few exceptions all have been significantly smaller than Pluto.  The two previously  largest KBOs were about 540 miles across.
       Quaoar (also known as 2002 LM60) hasn't been officially named yet.  It's too new.  The International Astronomical Union will make the final decision.  Trujillo and Brown suggested "Quaoar" after a creation god of the Native American Tongva tribe – the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin where Cal-tech is located.  According to legend, Quaoar "came down from heaven, and after reducing chaos to or-der, laid out the world on the back of seven giants.  He then created the lower animals, and then man-kind."
       Eventually, predicts Brown, KBOs even larger than Quaoar will be found, and Hubble will be crucial for follow-up observations to pin down their sizes.  Meanwhile, Quaoar is the record  holder – a tantalizing glimpse of perhaps bigger things to come.
 

       BBAS President John Bell presented the program for our November meeting.  John’s presentation was largely based on a slide program by James B. Kaler of the University of Illinois.  The author of several books, Kaler wrote the Little Book of Stars, which John also referenced in his presentation.
       Are the stars eternal?  We may have the impression that they are, since the Sun is about 10 billion years old.  Small stars may last billions of years.  Higher-mass stars are shorter lived, and more interesting in their old age.  Initially, it seems paradoxical that smaller stars have longer lives than larger ones.  Fortunately for us, the sun is rather small as stars go, and is expected to survive several billion years into the future.
       Stars originate from rotating clouds of gas.  In the life of such a cloud, a disk eventually develops with jets of gas perpendicular to the plane of the disk.
       In a cross section of the sun, the core comprises about 40% of the sun.  The surface of the sun has a temperature of about 6,000 degrees Kelvin, but the core is much hotter because of the compressive force of gravity and nuclear fusion processes.  Gamma rays also add to the heating of the core, since they take about 1 million years to reach the surface of the sun.
       All stars spend much of their lives on the diagonal lines of the Hertzsprung-Russel (H-R) Diagram, moving upward in the diagram and becoming redder as they burn up their nuclear fuel.  Eventually, the sun will became a red giant, expanding to a size larger than the earth’s orbit, and of course, incinerating the earth in the process.  Super giants, like Betelgeuse in Orion, are as large as the orbit of Saturn.
       When a large star collapses into a singularity, it becomes a black hole.  The singularity will then be eternal, lasting forever.

       A brief business meeting followed the program.  For the Education Committee, President John Bell reported that he had given a subscription to Astronomy to the Ft. Davis High School.  Vice President and Web Master Bernie Zelazny reported 2912 recent visits to our BBAS Website.
       John reported that we will be holding a Board meeting in December principally to deal with the nomination of officers for next year.