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Weird Science

Local astronomers have put out an all-points bulletin for a meteor that blazed past Alberta Monday night.

Local astronomers have put out an all-points bulletin for a meteor that blazed past Alberta Monday night.

Frank Florian, director of space sciences at the Telus World of Science in Edmonton, put out a call this week looking for anyone who saw a large fireball north of Edmonton on the night of Feb. 15. Meteors usually produce fireballs when they hit the atmosphere at high speed, he explains, which can help researchers find where they land.

Very little is known about this meteor so far, Florian says, apart from the fact that it was spotted in the skies north of Edmonton between 5:30 and 9 p.m. Some reports suggest it may have broken up in mid-air. Spaceweather.com, a popular astronomy website, recently posted a picture of what could be the fireball in question.

Meteors are leftovers from the formation of the solar system, according to St. Albert astronomer Murray Paulson, so scientists are always on the lookout for them. The intense heat and friction on re-entry bakes them black and often produces a brilliant fireball.

“Anytime a big fireball comes down,” Paulson says, “it likely leaves something big on the ground.”

Big fireballs can be as bright as the full moon. Because meteors are so quick, it’s tough to find their landing spots without a good fix on the fireball’s trajectory — when a fireball winks out, its meteor is usually 30 kilometres up moving at hundreds of kilometres an hour. Researchers found the Buzzard Coulee meteor of 2008 due to hundreds of eyewitness and film accounts of its fireball.

Anyone with information on the fireball should call Florian at 780-452-9100. Researchers are interested in the time and place where it was spotted, its rough heading and height and any sounds or colours it produced.

Captain Kirk should keep the Enterprise in neutral, suggests a new study — warp speed would fry his ship with lethal radiation.

William Edelstein, a physicist with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Maryland presented this conclusion at a recent meeting of the American Physical Society.

This study started about 20 years ago, Edelstein says, when his son asked him if there was any friction in space. Yes, he replied — there are about two atoms of hydrogen in every cubic centimetre of outer space and those atoms would bounce off a spaceship’s hull, causing friction. He recently revisited this question in the context of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, known for zipping around space at or above light speed.

“If you’re going really fast, the hydrogen isn’t going to bounce off,” he says. “It’s going to go right through the ship.”

Even at a paltry 99 per cent of light-speed (less than Warp One), the ship would smack into these atoms with enough energy to release about 61 sieverts of radiation per second.

“Six sieverts is fatal,” Edelstein says. “If you’re going very fast, you will die instantly.”

The ship would need about four to 4,400 meters of lead or a hull charged to about a billion volts to stop this radiation, Edelstein says, neither of which seem practical. “Hydrogen atoms are unavoidable space mines,” he says, which could explain why alien species haven’t zipped over to Earth yet.

This doesn’t mean faster-than-light travel is impossible, he adds. “Maybe there are other kinds of physics we don’t know about.”

Teleportation shouldn’t be possible due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, he notes (which states that you cannot simultaneously know an electron’s precise speed and location), but the Enterprise has gadgets that compensate for it. “I’m sure the Edelstein compensator will work as well as the Heisenberg compensator,” he jokes.

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